
Class LBiohS 

Book ... 

Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BASIS OF 



PRACTICAL TEACHING 



A Book in Pedagogy 



BY 
ELMER BURRITT BRYAN 

PRESIDENT OF FRANKLIN COLLEGE 




SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY 

NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 



IblOZS 

.Br 



7 iHOb 

ex. 

- P* 3. 




Copyright, 1905, 
By SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY 



PREFACE 

More than twenty years' experience as a teacher, 
half of which has been as a teacher of teachers, has 
led the author to believe that there are certain funda- 
mental facts of science and principles of education 
of which all teachers should have a knowledge. 
The aim in bringing out this volume is to gather 
together such facts and principles, and put them 
in readable form. The book is not a pedagogical 
treatise which assumes a knowledge of psychology, 
neurology, and child study, neither is it a text on 
these subjects. 

If the author has not failed in his purpose, this 
volume is a plain statement of certain facts in all 
these fields interpreted in terms of education. It 
is hoped that the book will be of special benefit 
to teachers, students of elementary pedagogy in 
colleges and normal schools, and to parents. 

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy 
of the Pedagogical Seminary and the Educator- 
Journal, in which portions of certain chapters have 
previously been published. 

3 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Introduction 7 

II. Our Inheritance 15 

III. The Physical Basis of Mental Life . . 24 

IV. A Cycle : Stimulation, Interpretation, Ex- 

pression '33 

V. Habit 43 

VI. The Psychology of Work .... 52 

VII. Memory 63 

VIII. Arrested Development 73 

IX. Interest and Attention 82 

X. The Significance of the Recitation . . 90 

XI. On Relating Work 99 

XII. The Stimulus of Success . . . .111 

XIII. The Individual in Institutions . . .120 

XIV. The Training of Young Children . . .129 
XV. The Significance of the Second Dentition 161 

XVI. The Pedagogy of Youth 170 



THE BASIS OF PRACTICAL 
TEACHING 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

There was a time when the branches taught 
seemed to be the center and end of education. From 
this extreme view of the subject there has been a 
gradual transition toward the opposite view, that the 
child is the center and end of education. This is pre- 
sumably the most advanced view generally held at the 
present time. Yet, while it is recognized that the 
child is the center and end of education, I think we 
are not resting upon this as an abstract or isolated 
thought. As the transition from the first view to the 
second and opposite one has been slow and gradual, 
so the present movement from the child, as such, to 
the child in his entire setting will be neither rapid nor 
always encouraging. 

It was seen that arithmetic, for example, is not the 
reason for the school, but that the child with his limi- 

7 



8 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

tations and possibilities is the reason. The observ- 
ance of this fact was the excuse for introducing 
books on mental science into the teacher's professional 
reading-course. But the thought that the child is 
made up of soul, body, and clothes was not grasped in 
its fullness; and, as we should expect, we find that 
stress was laid on the most abstract phase of the child, 
and the one which would seem farthest removed from 
the old idea of the branch as end and the child as 
means. 

The first so-called strictly professional books, there- 
fore, were metaphysical rather than psychological. 
There was no discussion of the constitution or nature 
of the child as such, but almost the entire emphasis 
was placed upon that phase of the child known as his 
mind. The professional literature available to the 
teacher, while in most part it was truthful and some- 
times helpful, was always abstract, heavy, and diffi- 
cult of application. 

The chief defect was that we were not viewing the 
child in his entirety. When it seemed as though the 
rank and file of the teachers were becoming reconciled 
to the foregoing programme (although I think they did 
not feel at home in it), we had brought to our atten- 
tion a fact which we had always known, but of which 



Introduction 9 

we were not seemingly conscious — namely, that every 
child mind that ever came to school came in some 
kind of body, and that the kind of body in which it 
came determined, to a great degree, what the mind 
might accomplish. This, doubtless, is a great step 
in advance of anything which has gone before, and it 
would seem that too much emphasis could not be 
given to the idea that the entire child, body as well as 
mind, is the subject of education. In fact, from the 
absolute point of view, I am sure that too much em- 
phasis could not be given it. The time and energy 
that have been spent studying eyes, ears, noses, skins, 
feet, and hands, with a view to gaining a clearer 
and deeper insight into the physical and mental con- 
ditions of the child, have been well spent. All the 
conventions that have been held, all the papers that 
have been prepared and read, all the speeches that 
have been made, and all the discussion that has re- 
sulted from these things, have been eminently worth 
while. It is doubtful, however, if more than the first 
word has been spoken along this particular line of 
pedagogical research by those who know whereof they 
speak. 

The chief hindrance, so to speak, to the compara- 
tively new movement has been the work of the over- 



io The Basis of Practical Teaching 

ardent but untrained and unwise advocates of it. 
There has been extensive and vigorous opposition to 
this movement toward the educational laboratory, 
and some of our most experienced and enthusiastic 
educational leaders, in the score of years that have 
just passed, look upon it as a fad which is having 
its day and will soon cease to inflict itself upon 
us. That this should be true is by no means 
strange. The opposition and the doubt manifested 
toward this new educational truth are no stronger 
than the opposition and doubt that were shown at 
the birth of the sacred theories to which these 
very same people now cling with so much tenacity. 
The birth pains of ideas are frequently as severe as 
physical birth pains, and as in physical birth the pains 
are proportional to the complexity of the individual 
born and the one giving birth, so also in the world of 
ideas, he who has all his theories and philosophy 
worked out and wrapped up and labeled, and who has 
lived by them in faith for years, must find great hesi- 
tancy and mental pain in breaking away from them. 
In discussing this subject with those whose mental 
nurture has been largely speculative pap, the point 
of contention is that it is a low and materialistic way 
of looking at a human being, to consider him as sub- 



Introduction n 

ject, to so great an extent, to his body and physical 
environment — that it would be more pleasant, and 
much more encouraging, to believe that mind could 
lift itself above its presumably physical limitations to 
the realization of any task or ideal which it might set 
for itself. It must be admitted that this would seem 
to be a pleasant way, and that there perhaps could 
be but one possible objection to looking at it in just 
this way, — which is, that we cannot do it. 

We are too much inclined to speculate and to work 
out fine-spun educational theories, to wrinkle the fore- 
head and overtax the mind and strain the eyes in 
trying to search out a deep, mysterious, semi- mythical 
something that will settle things; and we have let 
the resources at hand and at our disposal go unap- 
propriated. The man who has to study physiology, 
anatomy, materia medica, and pedagogy to work out 
and appreciate the grain of truth in this little formula — 
(i) as you think, so are you; (2) as you eat, so you 
think; (3) therefore, as you eat, so are you — will never 
be a power in the earth from the standpoint either of 
materia medica or pedagogy. And the man who has 
to leave the halls of any American college for some 
years of study abroad, to learn that the varying con- 
ditions of climate and the varying conditions of pestif- 



12 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

erous insect life serve as distinct causes of his varying 
moods and abilities to do work, has already shown 
himself so insensible to his copartnership in the solu- 
tion of life's problem as to render him wholly unfit 
for pedagogical research. 

I have emphasized this point somewhat, that I 
might not be interpreted as underestimating it in dis- 
cussing the next phase — one just beginning to dawn 
upon us, and one in which I so thoroughly believe. 
Yet surely no one of these or all of them constitute 
our sine qua non. We must avoid any such attitude 
toward so great a problem. The day of settlement 
is not yet at hand ; we are even yet doing pioneer work 
on the frontier. John Smith thought he had seen 
America ! But we are all John Smiths on the James 
River, and have not crossed the Appalachians, much 
less the Mississippi Valley or the Rockies beyond. 

It would seem from what has been said that there 
can be no rational study of the educational problem 
in which the body of the child is ignored or passed by 
with but slight attention. And this truth, born of 
struggle as it has been, is finding acceptance on the 
part of a large minority, if not already a majority, of 
school people and those interested in children. To 
consent to a theory and to be able to work effectively 



Introduction 13 

in the light of it are two different things. Having, 
therefore, the consent of many teachers as to the 
merits of this view and the need of its application, we 
will make it the purpose of some of the following chap- 
ters to help, in a practical way, in the solution of this 
particular problem. 

Every mind, then, does come to school in a body, 
and the kind of body in which it comes does determine 
to some degree, at least, what it will do with itself 
after it gets to school. But while this is true, it is 
just as true that every child (I mean, now, the entire 
child — soul, body, and clothes) who comes to school 
comes in a crowd, sits with a crowd, studies in a crowd, 
(and sometimes with a, crowd), recites with a crowd, 
plays with a crowd, goes home with a crowd, eats with 
a crowd, and often sleeps with a crowd. So it can 
be seen that he is a very much crowded individual, 
and, if possible, should have something to relieve the 
pressure. I have often thought that if a child could 
pick up his body and go to some Robinson Crusoe 
island to live ; if he could have the necessaries of phys- 
ical life sufficiently supplied; if by some special act 
of revelation he could have the average measure of 
school wisdom, as given in the class room, instilled 
into his mind ; if he were subject to the pains and aches 



14 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

of average humanity, but were entirely isolated from 
human society; and then we could have written out 
for us the history of what this child thought and did, 
— that with all this, we could have but little notion of 
what the child would have been if reared in human 
institutions. In other words, if I knew to-day what 
you would do, and what you would be, in a life of 
absolute isolation, I should know but very little — 
although somewhat — of what you really will do, or be, 
in a life of human environment and institutions. 

It may not be easy to induce people to give their 
consent to the importance of viewing the child, in his 
physical setting and in his relations to his natural and 
institutional environment, as the center and end of 
education, but such consent must be won because, up 
to date, that is our most comprehensive child. Hav- 
ing gained this point, it will then remain to assist 
school people and others interested in the welfare of 
children to some plausible way of rearing such a child. 



CHAPTER II 

OUR INHERITANCE 

What a thing is at any stage of its development de- 
pends upon two things : what it was when it started 
— its inheritance ; and what it has done and had 
done to itself since it started — its experience. This 
chapter will discuss the more general features of in- 
heritance. 

At birth every individual has a given organism for 
which he is in no sense personally responsible. In 
most cases this organism is capable of large develop- 
ment in strength, health, and efficiency, and in most 
cases also it can, through failure to observe and prac- 
tice the laws of development inherent within it, fail 
to realize upon its inheritance, and so decline and die. 
With this given organism are also inherited broad 
general instincts, or tendencies to action and reaction. 
The student of psychology and pedagogy should not 
fail to remember that these instincts are general and 
not special — upon this fact rests much of the hope 
for success in training. The individual is not born 

i5 



1 6 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

with the instinct to make definite specific reactions to 
definite specific stimuli, but may react in a large num- 
ber of ways, any one of which may in the first instance 
be appropriate to the stimulus causing the reaction. 

The stimulus which comes to a young child when 
he first sees a penknife, for example, results in numer- 
ous reactions, many of which would not be appropri- 
ate in an adult. The child learns through experience 
what these appropriate adult reactions are and no 
longer tries to suck or eat the knife handle. But in 
his first days sucking and biting were the instinctive 
reactions to the penknife stimulus. 

It is a principle of matter and mind that things 
tend to act as they have previously acted. This is 
seen in the letter paper that has been folded; in 
the coat sleeve that has wrinkled; in hair that has 
been parted in the middle, or on the side; in people 
who have learned to use ungrammatical forms in 
youth; in children who have not been taught to con- 
trol their tempers, and in children who have been 
taught to do so. It is seen in the story-teller, in the 
man who exaggerates, in habits of carelessness and 
habits of accuracy. Whatever an individual does, 
constitutes in his organism an added excuse for doing 
it again. 



Our Inheritance 17 

It can be seen, therefore, how important it is that 
these general instincts of the child should be set going 
in the right way and not be allowed to shoot off in ways 
which will prevent his development, and which may 
result in ruin. Because of improper associates (per- 
sonal stimuli) during the years of puberty and adoles- 
cence, which mark the rise and development of a racial 
instinct, many a youth has apparently been rendered 
incapable of ever having a right mental reaction 
when thinking of the opposite sex. So it is with vari- 
ous instincts during our entire lives. The most im- 
portant thing that can happen to a child is that he 
shall have the wisest possible guidance during these 
early years, when he is making his first reactions to 
this great world of stimuli — physical, personal, social, 
and religious — in which he is practically swamped. 
New light is thus shed upon the importance and sanc- 
tity of parenthood, and new emphasis is placed upon 
the responsibility, the opportunity, and the dignity of 
the teaching profession. Nothing will be more con- 
ducive to thoughtfulness on the part of the teacher 
in everything he does than the realization of the fact 
that he is not teaching for a day only; that the child's 
behavior, his life of activity, his responses to his en- 
vironment to-day, are blazing the way in which he will 



1 8 The Basis of Practical Teachin 



g 



in all probability go to-morrow, and all the days that 
follow to-morrow. 

The great length of the period of infancy in the 
human child is significant. Contrary to the popular 
thought that man is the least instinctive of animals, 
he is perhaps at birth the most instinctive. He is not 
born with so many ready-made specific instincts as 
are the lower animals, and herein lies his hope of prog- 
ress. Within a few months after birth the puppy 
and the kitten are performing practically all the dog 
and cat activities, and are performing them as well as 
they ever will. They have in a very true sense in- 
herited these definite modes of activity and they can 
no more avoid them or outlive them than they can 
their color. Their period of infancy is very short, for 
they have little to learn. With the human child this 
is not true. Twenty- five or thirty years are required 
to bring him to adulthood. At birth or soon afterward 
he is not able to perform numerous activities with pre- 
cision and accuracy as are the lower animals. For 
years he is incapable of doing anything with precision 
and accuracy. But he starts with an organism and 
with broad general instincts that are capable, by proper 
training during his long childhood, of being developed 
into specific skills heretofore unrealized in the race. 



Our Inheritance 19 

The human nervous system is no exception to the ten- 
dency of all things to act again as they have previously 
acted. As a consequence most of the adult human 
activities are the results of habits which have been 
formed in the life of the individual. The general in- 
stinct with which the child started, in manifesting 
itself in certain definite ways at the beginning, instead 
of certain other definite ways which were just as pos- 
sible and just as appropriate, has developed into 
specific habits, and has done so by losing its general 
possibilities. This can be illustrated if we liken the 
possibilities of the young nervous system and its gen- 
eral instinctive tendencies to the possibilities of new 
milk. The new milk has butter possibilities, cheese 
possibilities, and doubtless many others. Now if it 
goes through the processes which result in butter, it 
loses its cheese possibilities. The price it pays for 
being butter is that it shall never be cheese. So it is 
in the development upon the basic human instincts: 
the possibilities at the beginning are numerous and 
untold, and in the adult they are less numerous and 
more specific. As a rule the' price we pay for certain 
skills is our inability to be skillful in certain other lines. 
The Jack-of-all-trades can only be such at the price 
of being master of none, and the master of one trade 



io The Basis of Practical Teaching 

can be such only by surrendering the original possi- 
bility of shallow versatility. 

It seems to be pretty generally recognized that the 
child inherits the religious instinct, but he does not in- 
herit the Methodist or the Presbyterian instinct. He 
does not inherit the Protestant or Catholic instinct. 
In all probability he does not inherit the Christian or 
Mohammedan instinct. But he is by nature religious, 
and which way he shall go will be determined more 
by his early personal stimulations than by all other 
things combined. The importance of the character 
of the child's associates cannot from this standpoint 
be overestimated. It is not at all strange, psycho- 
logically, that the children of Methodists should be 
Methodists ; the children of Catholics, Catholics ; 
and the children of Mohammedans, Mohammedans. 
The strange thing would be if they were not. We 
find exactly what, from the standpoint of the psycholo- 
gist, we should expect to find. The child inherits 
the potentialities for a social life, — a life of organiza- 
tion, — but he does not inherit the specific tendency to 
organize as the Democrats do or as the Republicans 
do. But here again we see what we should expect, 
that the children of Democrats are Democrats, and 
the children of Republicans are Republicans. Any 



Our Inheritance 21 

violation of this rule is exceptional. The effect of 
personal stimuli, from childhood up, is here plainly 
seen. 

The child doubtless has the language instinct, but 
in all probability he does not start with the English 
language instinct, or the German language instinct, or 
the French or Spanish language instinct. In which 
direction this language instinct shall manifest itself 
depends upon the specific language stimuli which 
come to the child. The conditions for speaking the 
Spanish language fluently are that the child shall be 
continually surrounded by people who speak it flu- 
ently, and the price he pays for such attainment 
through such personal stimuli (social environment) is his 
inability to speak many or any of the other languages 
so well. Or, again, the child is not born with a good 
instinct for grammar or a poor instinct for grammar. 
Whether he shall finally say "had gone" and "between 
you and me," or shall be doomed to say "had went" 
and "between you and I," depends primarily and al- 
most entirely upon the language stimuli to which he 
is subjected during his first years. The child is born 
with the instinct to feed himself, but he is born with 
neither good table manners nor bad table manners. 
These are matters of acquisition that are, however, 



11 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

rooted in the general instinct, and result from it under 
specific stimuli. 

The teacher is almost sure to underestimate his 
magnificent chance and his tremendous responsibility, 
if he does not realize that the child's inheritance is not 
special, and that his ready-made reactions are com- 
paratively few; that upon him devolves the task of 
providing for the child stimuli whose appropriate re- 
actions will make for strength and not for weakness. 
The wise teacher will see that it is the sum total of 
such reactions which constitutes behavior, and that be- 
havior is but the expressed side of character. He will 
then be able to evaluate the different school branches 
and see the significance of each. He will no more 
look upon the school course as a thing to be accom- 
plished by the students, but rather as a vast variety of 
opportunities to stimulate the students to activity. 
This conception of the child's inheritance will do more 
to enable the thoughtful teacher to place him where he 
belongs, at the center of the entire school process, than 
will any other psychologic conception. It will enable 
him to see that although through blood relationship 
it is given to the parent to determine what shall be the 
range of the child's possibilities, nevertheless through 
the teacher as the conscious agent of the child's most 



Our Inheritance 23 

thoughtful stimulations are his definite, specific attain- 
ments realized. A thousand ways the child may go ; it 
is the teacher's pleasant, though often difficult, task to 
determine that he shall go in those ways only which 
lead to life. // 



CHAPTER III 

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MENTAL LIFE 

All mental life, so far as we are able to observe, is 
directly associated with some sort of physical organism, 
and, so far as we know, this is always an animal organ- 
ism. There may be a psychology of plants, but the 
fact has not been established. It is a generally ac- 
cepted fact that consciousness is more closely associated 
with and directly dependent upon the nervous system 
than upon any other part of the organism. This 
gives us a basis for the study of consciousness in two 
directions: (i) from the standpoint of neurology — 
thus ascertaining, as well as may be, the exact relation 
between neural development, neural complexity and 
disease, and the mental life, normal and abnormal; 
and (2) from the standpoint of expression. We know 
the mental life of another only as we are able, through 
introspection and observation of his expressive move- 
ments and language, to infer what his conscious states 
are. But his expressive life is subject to nervous 

control. The nervous system then serves the double 

24 



The Physical Basis of Mental Life 25 

purpose of being the basis of all psychical life and the 
basis for the expression of it. It is evident, therefore, 
how important must be a general notion of the nervous 
system even to the amateur psychologist. 

The nervous system is composed of a vast number 
of neurons, so called, each of which consists of a nerve 
cell and a nerve fiber or process. The nerve fibers 
extend into all parts of the body, dividing and subdivid- 
ing into the smallest conceivable fibrils in the peripheral 
organs. It is the opinion of the most careful and 
thoroughgoing students of neurology that these neurons, 
even in the periphery, never directly connect one with 
another; however close they may come, and however 
minutely they may intertwine, they never, so to speak, 
grow into each other. The transfer of a nervous 
impulse from one neuron into another is accomplished 
by a method known in physical science as induction. 
The constitution of the nervous system as to matter 
and structure is such as to permit of three possibilities 
for nervous impulses: (1) Many nervous impulses 
may be propagated at the same time. (2) A ner- 
vous impulse may be modified by the induction of 
another impulse from a neighboring neuron. (3) A 
nervous impulse transferred to another neuron may be 
modified by an impulse already there. 



iG The Basis of Practical Teaching 

The question of the exact relationship between 
neurology and psychology, between matter and mind, 
is a much mooted one, and one which may never be 
fully answered by science. The discussion of Mercier 
in his book on " Sanity and Insanity" will help the 
reader into the latest and most plausible theory on 
the subject : — 

"The relation of mind to nervous processes is very pecul- 
iar, and since it is, in fact, very different from that which 
is vaguely current, and, I will not say accepted, but assumed, 
by many who have not studied the matter, it will be neces- 
sary for the reader to rid himself as far as possible of the 
preconceived notions of the matter, and to begin its con- 
sideration afresh with a perfectly open mind. In the first 
place, he must discard altogether the notion that mind can 
work upon, or influence, or produce changes in the nervous 
system, or in matter of any kind, however arranged; and, 
in the second place, he must rid himself of the idea that 
any nervous process, or any movement, or rearrangement 
of material particles, can ever, under any circumstances, 
be transferred into mental phenomena — into an idea, 
or a feeling, or any other state or condition of mind. 

"The true connection between nervous and mental 
phenomena is believed to be this : that when, in the course 
of its circuit from the organs of sense to the muscles, a nerve 
current reaches the highest centers, and sets them in action, 
then this activity of the highest nervous centers is attended, 



The Physical Basis of Mental Life 27 

we cannot say why or how, by mental states. Every altera- 
tion of nervous tension in these upper centers is attended 
by a variation in the mental processes. Every fluctuation 
of nerve currents, in this way and in that, has an accom- 
paniment in a variation of mental states strictly in corre- 
spondence with it. The one set of changes takes place in 
the nervous system, and is an affair of molecules, and 
discharges, and nerve currents. The other set of changes 
takes place in the mind, and is an affair of ideas, and feel- 
ings, and volitions. The one set of changes accompanies 
the other set of changes invariably and instantly, just as 
the movements of the shadow accompany the movements 
of the man. But the mental changes can no more influence 
or alter the nervous changes than the shadow can move 
the man ; and the nervous system, or the body which con- 
tains it, can no more act independently and directly upon 
the mind than the man can pick up his shadow and throw 
it away. The influence of the body is limited to the changes 
that it brings about in the working of the higher nervous 
centers; and when such a change is produced, change of 
mental processes takes place simultaneously, just as a 
change of the attitude of the body is accompanied by a 
change of shape of the shadow. But to suppose that an 
action on the body can influence the mind without changing 
the nervous centers is like supposing that a man can alter 
the shape of his shadow without moving his body." 

The theory of the parallelism of neural and psychical 
states seems the most probable one, and the one fraught 



28 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

with fewest dangers of rank misconception. We know, 
for example, that as the organisms of conscious beings 
vary in complexity, so the accompanying conscious- 
nesses vary. We know that the more complex and 
highly developed nervous system is found in conjunc- 
tion with the higher and more complex forms of con- 
sciousness, — thought, feelings, and volitions, — and 
that the simple, undifferentiated, unicellular (so to 
speak) nervous system is paralleled by the simplest 
and most rudimentary form of consciousness. In 
man we find the parallelism between the most com- 
plex, highly developed nervous system on the one 
hand, and on the other hand, psychical activities 
unthought of in connection with any of the lower 
forms. But so far as is known to science, conscious- 
ness does not accompany changes or disturbances in 
all parts of the nervous system — not even all those 
in the higher nervous centers. What happens below 
the threshold, no one is able to say. I have no quar- 
rel with him who says, "A rudimentary conscious- 
ness, a consciousness in potentia, accompanies all 
neural activities." Who affirms and who denies are 
equally ignorant of the facts. But for all scientific 
and practical purposes we are authorized by the 
facts to say that disturbances in the higher brain, 



The Physical Basis of Mental Life 29 

the cortex, alone are accompanied by consciousness, 
and, furthermore, only those disturbances which are 
sufficiently severe and novel have such accompani- 
ments. 

Doubtless every hour thousands of little vegetative 
and physiological changes are taking place in the cor- 
tex, whose mental counterpart, if there be any, never 
rises into the realm of consciousness. The disturbance 
must be sufficiently severe, the body casting the shadow 
— to revert to the figure of Mercier — must be suffi- 
ciently opaque, to cast a shadow. The disturbance 
must also be comparatively novel. Disturbances 
which were at some former time accompanied by the 
closest kind of conscious attention and adjustment 
of movements are no longer thus paralleled by con- 
sciousness. The lock has worn smooth and no longer 
catches or screeches. A complex activity once con- 
trolled by the highest conscious centers is, through 
the force of habit, no longer so controlled. Con- 
sciousness has been lost with novelty. 

The close relationship existing between our neural 
and our psychical lives is nowhere more clearly seen 
than in the field of nervous diseases and mental ineffi- 
ciency. The shuffling gait, the hanging, character- 
less hands, the open, uncontrolled mouth of the idiot 



30 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

or the insane person, are typical signs of nervous 
disorder and mental shortness. 

Quoting again from Merrier, to emphasize this 
thought from the standpoint of an expert in nervous 
and mental disorders: — 

"It is in fact impossible for mind alone to be disordered. 
For feelings and thoughts, mental states and mental pro- 
cesses, are but the shadows or accompaniments of nervous 
states and nervous processes ; and since no mental change 
can occur save as the shadow or accompaniment of a ner- 
vous change, so, a fortiori, no mental disorder can occur ex- 
cept as the shadow or accompaniment of a nervous disorder. 
Whenever, therefore, there is disorder of mind, there must 
be disorder of nervous processes — of those processes which 
have a mental accompaniment — that is to say, of those 
which are highest. But the highest nervous processes are 
those which regulate the movements of the body with re- 
spect to the circumstances in the outside world — are, in 
fact, those which actuate conduct. Hence, when these high- 
est nervous processes are disordered, not only must mind be 
disordered, but conduct must be disordered also. While, 
therefore, we find from observation that as a matter of 
fact disorder of mind is not the only deviation from the 
normal in insanity, on the other hand we find from the 
principles already laid down that mental disorder cannot 
exist alone, but must always be accompanied by disorder 
of nervous processes and disorder of conduct." 



The Physical Basis of Mental Life 31 

Enough has been said to show how truly and in 
what sense there is a physical basis of mental life, 
psychologically speaking. Once more the practical 
significance of this fact is what is of chief concern to 
the teacher and the parent. Such defects as stam- 
mering and stuttering are due to nervous affection, 
and have been entirely overcome by appropriate 
motor training. Nervousness itself may be due to 
some local defect, such as weak eyes or eyes out of 
focus. In such cases a correction of the local defect 
by glasses or other sane treatment is the only cor- 
rective needed for the general defect. General ner- 
vousness, inability to control one's self in any way, 
bodily or mentally, is a condition to be avoided or 
corrected, regardless of every other consideration. 
It will be a sign of better days when parents of ner- 
vous children are wise enough to take them from 
school if need be, and let them romp and play in the 
sunshine and fresh air, and rest quietly alone and 
away from all causes of excitement and self-conscious- 
ness ; and when teachers are wise enough to act in 
loco parentis, and will violate the formal programme 
of the school enough to lighten the burdens of these 
children, and give them more time for rest and out- 
of-door exercise. Better that the child should remain 



32 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

in sublime ignorance of many things which the schools 
teach than that he should graduate from them a ner- 
vous wreck; and this comes home to us with multi- 
plied significance when we realize that such nervous 
undoing may, and in many cases does, result in the 
complete mental undoing of the child. 



CHAPTER IV 

A CYCLE : STIMULATION, INTERPRETATION, EXPRES- 
SION 

An individual is capable of three things, — he can 
be impressed; he can reflect, reorganize, reconstruct; 
and he can express. The mental cycle is sensation, 
organization, and expression. This "cycle," without 
setting hard and fast lines, serves to put in the brief- 
est and plainest way the relationship of certain psy- 
chical factors. 

The raw material of all intelligence comes to the 
individual as sensations resulting from outer stimula- 
tions. It is a generally admitted fact that if a person 
were denied the use of all the senses from birth on, 
he would know absolutely nothing. The senses are 
the avenues through which all the stimulations to 
intellectual life come. The importance, therefore, 
of senses which function fully and normally cannot be 
overestimated even from the psychological and peda- 
gogical standpoints; and one of the large tasks of the 
teacher is to teach those who have eyes to see, and 

33 



34 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

those who have ears to hear. The beauties of nature 
are not yet seen by the children, and the unheard 
songs are innumerable. The great advantage to 
come from nature study in the schools is that the chil- 
dren may see the world and hear it as it has never 
been seen and heard by the people before. 

Impression is the first consideration in child de- 
velopment, — this to be followed by reflection, organi- 
zation, and finally expression. We should seek not a 
formal, artificial, superficial impression, but a natural 
impression through the child's senses by the world 
of nature and art about him. The bane of the school 
has been artificial impression, to the practical exclu- 
sion of everything else. 

Teachers direct too much; they explain too much; 
they, themselves, recite too much; they talk too much. 
There is far too much of this kind of impression; yet 
the children do not see, neither do they hear. The 
consistent, quiet though forceful teacher who has 
grace enough to keep himself in the background, 
through his realization that the school is the child's 
great chance, will find opportunity on every hand to 
bring the children face to face with real things, to 
stimulate them to heretofore unthought-of activities, 
and so cultivate in them not only an interest in nature 



Stimulation, Interpretation, Expression 35 

and art, but a capacity to see and hear beauty of all 
kinds, as they have never been able to do before. All 
school work lends itself more or less to this kind of 
training, but science proper, manual training, nature 
study and the fine arts, including music, are especially 
adapted to this end. 

Before these sensations which the child gets from 
outer stimulations can serve him to any purpose, they 
must be interpreted, they must be shot through and 
through with meaning, they must have become signifi- 
cant. And before impressions, which are the direct 
resultants of significant sensations, or ideas, which are 
the indirect resultants of such sensations, can serve 
any purpose in our mental economy, it is necessary 
that they should be related; that all such compara- 
tively small units of our consciousness should be or- 
ganized in one fashion or another. This is the second 
step in the mental cycle as now considered. All the 
stimulations in the universe will fail to capitalize a 
person in the mental world unless he reflects, imagines, 
judges, thinks; unless he organizes himself mentally. 
Three conditions are primarily essential to the suc- 
cessful performance by the pupil of this process: 
(1) appropriate stimuli, including direction from the 
teacher ; (2) time ; (3) freedom from counter-stimu- 



36 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

lations. The first condition may be dismissed, being 
that already discussed as the first step of the cycle. 

The element of time is of vastly more importance 
than is generally recognized. Observation and ex- 
periment both show that time is not only an important, 
but strictly an essential element in mental organiza- 
tion of all kinds. 

The bright child who glances at a lesson just before 
the class is called, and gathers up enough points to 
appear well in recitation, has in no sense mastered 
the things so well as the plodder who has spent hours 
in preparation, and who in all probability shows to 
no better advantage in the recitation than the child 
with a moment's preparation. As a rule, at the end 
of a day or a week the bright child is not able to recall 
a single item of the lesson, whereas the plodder who 
accomplished comparatively little, and this at great 
expense of energy and time, retains with remarkable 
accuracy what cost him so much. He thought it over 
and had time to organize it, whereas the bright child, 
to use a figure, had never more than come tangent to it. 

A bicyclist, who was found lying unconscious at the 
foot of a long hill, was not able to recall afterward 
anything which had happened a half mile before he 
came to the hill, while he remembered distinctly his 



Stimulation, Interpretation, Expression 37 

experiences before this time. The stimuli which 
came to him through ears, eyes, and skin had not 
had time to make their mark — had not had time to 
become organized. 

A friend of mine living on a ranch had an excep- 
tionally vicious horse which had to be handled with 
the greatest care. One day while reading in the 
house it occurred to him that this vicious animal 
should be taken from the stable and "staked out" 
in the pasture. An hour later when the partner on 
the ranch came home, he found the horse running 
among the other horses dragging the long rope at- 
tached to the halter. Upon investigating, he found 
my friend in the pasture unconscious from a kick on 
the head. After he had regained consciousness, he 
was unable to recall anything which had happened 
from the time he decided to put up his book and 
"stake out" the horse. He did not remember how 
he went to the stable; whether he approached the 
horse the accustomed way or an exceptional way; 
what happened on the way to the pasture, or how he 
lost control of the horse. 

Advocates of short cuts in education need to bear 
in mind the point brought out by these examples. 
Time is necessary for the stimuli to produce an effect. 



38 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

Time is an essential to all training. Because a child 
is able to accomplish the four years' high school course 
in two years, it does not follow that he will derive the 
greatest benefit by doing it in that time, much less 
does it follow that the high school course should be 
shortened. There is no sympathy between modern 
psychology and the recent tendency to shorten and 
telescope courses of training. We need to bear in 
mind at all times that the purpose of the school is to 
exhaust the possibilities of the pupil and not the thing 
taught. The purpose of the college is to give an op- 
portunity for four years' training. The more capable 
will get more; the less capable, less. 

Two common customs of teachers in the school- 
room run counter to this theory of time as an essential 
element in the child's thought processes, and his de- 
velopment in general. One is the "rapid fire" method 
of conducting recitations; the other is mental dis- 
traction induced by the introduction of irrelevant 
matter in the form of stories and long-drawn illustra- 
tions, or by loose, scattering teaching. 

The "rapid fire" teachers, and their name is legion, 
seem to be cramped on the notion that the end of all 
school work is to get definite, concrete answers to 
definite questions. If we should judge from the way 



Stimulation, Interpretation, Expression 39 

they eagerly skip from one child to another in the 
search for the answer, without giving any one of them 
time to think at all, we might decide that it has never 
occurred to most teachers that the purpose of the 
school is to train children, and we might think that 
the excuse for the enormous outlay of money in a 
school system is the answering of questions. Teachers 
should realize that it isn't criminal to let a child think. 
They should recognize that not one little question in 
ten thousand which comes up in the schoolroom will 
ever come up again; that the little question in itself 
and the little answer in itself have absolutely no value. 
They should also realize that there will hardly be an 
hour in life when some new problem, unheard of and 
unsolved, will not confront the child, and he will need 
to be able to think. They need to realize that one 
large purpose of the school is to give the child an oppor- 
tunity to learn how to think, and that the only way to 
do this is to set him to work on great varieties of tasks, 
such as come up in all the subjects taught, and give 
him time to accomplish them. At the end of all these 
tasks the child will have accomplished himself, he will 
have turned out the big answer — a person who can 
think, and not a multitude of little insignificant, un- 
related, vocal or written answers. Many recitations, 



40 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

a majority of them, are not productive of a single, 
well-defined thought by a single pupil in the class. 
They are little more than rush-and-grab-hold guesses, 
with the result that we turn out of the schools, year by 
year, large numbers of rush-and-grab-hold guessers. 

The second common error, not to say crime, that is 
hourly committed in the name of a recitation, is the 
error of "side tracking" on a story, or of needless 
and far-fetched illustrations. A class coming from the 
physical laboratory to the recitation in history does 
not find it easy to transfer thoughts and attention from 
the one to the other. The pupils are pulling away 
from the physics and pulling toward history. They 
are, so to speak, tied up to the old post and find diffi- 
culty in getting away at once. The teacher sees this 
and doubles their difficulty. He says: "I see that 
you can't get your minds on history; let me tell you 
a story," and away he goes on something, related 
neither to physics nor to history. The class is now 
tied up to two posts, physics and the story, and it is 
practically impossible to secure any history thinking. 
Any subject that needs to be taught in this way should 
be removed from the curriculum ; any good teacher 
who needs to teach a particular subject in this way 
should be removed to another part of the curriculum; 



Stimulation, Interpretation, Expression 41 

and any teacher who teaches this way in general 
should be removed from the profession. 

This illustration applies as well to the third point of 
counter-stimulations. Time will accomplish little for 
the child if he is subjected to numerous and strong 
counter-stimulations. Herein lies the excuse for many 
requirements upon the school, such as regularity, 
punctuality, and quiet. Irregularity, tardiness, and 
noise not only affect the person directly responsible 
for them, but disturb the school by distracting from 
the work in hand. The teacher should be careful 
himself not to serve as a counter-stimulant. The 
high school teacher who changed gowns practically 
every afternoon had allowed a professional virtue 
(that of neatness and attractiveness) to develop into a 
professional vice. Her students were unable to think 
history ; they were thinking about the teacher's many 
pretty clothes. It is much worse where the counter- 
stimulant is the teacher's high, harsh voice continually 
talking and scolding. 

And then comes expression. It has been said that if 
all the class has thought the work through, it makes 
but little difference which member of the class recites ; 
this of course is not true. Ideas tend to express 
themselves. This has come to be a familiar tenet of 



42 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

psychology. It is true and fundamental. There is, 
however, another psychologic fact just as fundamental 
and true, but not so familiar, viz. that our expression 
of an idea tends to define and clarify it, and at the 
same time determines more or less the direction and 
strength of the ideas that follow. A fact never to be 
forgotten is that the life to be expressed is affected 
by the expression just as truly as the expression is 
affected by the life to be expressed. Students should 
be encouraged to express themselves. The oppor- 
tunities for expression in the schoolroom should be 
numerous and varied — opportunities for oral expres- 
sion, written expression, drawing, music, manual 
training of all kinds. Three opportunities, then, the 
school should afford the student — an opportunity 
for varied stimulations to useful mental activities; 
an opportunity for mental digestion, mental assimila- 
tion ; and greater opportunities than have heretofore 
been given him for fullness and richness of expression. 



CHAPTER V 

HABIT 

The word habit is worn threadbare. It is a 
much-used term in ethics, psychology, religion, and 
common talk. Many new and true things have been 
said about it in these last days, and many trite and 
commonplace, albeit more or less true things have 
been said about it for no one knows how long. All 
this in a way argues the importance of the subject 
and the unique and central place it occupies in the 
minds of the people, although its scientific significance 
is not generally understood. 

Habit makes for conservatism ; it makes for stability 
in the individual or social group, in the school or in 
the state. The new pair of shoes in the store is any- 
body's or nobody's. It is equally well suited to any 
one of a thousand men. Not so after the shoes have 
been worn by one of the thousand for a week; then 
they have become that man's shoes, and it is prac- 
tically impossible for them to be properly adjusted 
to any one else. They have taken an individual set 

43 



44 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

— they have taken on character ; they have chosen, 
so to speak, to be such and such shoes, and the other 
nine hundred and ninety- nine original possibilities 
have been lost — lost in the realization of this one 
actuality, in the formation of this one definite, specific 
character. So it is with a human being or a social 
group, however large ; and well it is that it is so. 
Herein lies one's hope and one's doom, either of 
which is one's own make. 

The biologic basis for habit is the principle found 
in all matter, that things tend to act as they have 
acted. They not only tend to do the things they have 
heretofore done, but they tend to do them in the same 
way. This is especially true of the nervous system, 
which has a plasticity that yields readily to impressions 
and retains them with great accuracy and complete- 
ness. The fact that the nervous system has done a 
certain thing in a certain way constitutes an excuse 
for the performance of this thing in the way it was 
previously performed — this is true of a thought, an 
act, or an emotion. Many men are the perpetual slaves 
of vile thoughts, because in youth they allowed their 
minds to dwell upon vile things. The work of many 
men is poor and ineffectual because in youth they 
were allowed to go about their work in a weak, vascil- 



Habit 



45 



lating, and halting way ; and the emotions of many 
men are their masters because they were not properly 
restrained in childhood and youth. But many a man 
is a tower of strength because his years have been 
given to the highest and noblest types of thinking, 
to the performance of deeds worthy a child of God, 
and to emotions which appropriately accompany such 
behavior. When a person decides upon a course of 
action, he not only chooses this one particular thing, 
but he chooses what particular tendencies he will set 
a-going in his life for all time. He not only decides 
what manner of man he shall be for the time being, 
but he establishes tendencies which will help to de- 
termine what manner of man he shall always be. 

The advantages resulting from habits which are the 
allies of one's well-being are many and great. Habit 
simplifies movements. In harnessing a horse for the 
first time a boy makes several times as many move- 
ments as he will make six months later ; in dressing 
his feet a baby makes more movements and expends 
more energy than will be necessary finally to dress 
his entire body. When first put up to the table, the 
young child seeks his food with hands, body, and feet. 
He is not able to sit quietly and reach out one hand 
for his food. Movements at first are very complex 



46 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

and many of them quite superfluous — not so when 
they have become habitual. 

Habit makes for accuracy. At the end of six months 
the boy not only harnesses the horse with fewer move- 
ments and in much less time, but he is more apt to 
have it done right, to have both holdbacks and both 
lines fastened. He has become accurate, makes 
fewer mistakes, is more trustworthy. The baby has 
learned to feed himself with one hand and misses his 
mouth less often. He is a sure shot. Feeding him- 
self has become habitual and is done with accuracy, 
and so it is with all processes that are subject to habit. 
A person never walks well while he is learning to 
walk, nor later if he thinks about the process while 
performing it. Conscious gestures and voice modu- 
lations are never so graceful and effective as they 
should be. There was a time when the skilled pianist 
consciously attended to the music, the keyboard, and 
his hands, but no longer is he obliged to do so. He 
could not perform if he should try to do so. The 
hierarchy of habits that has been set up takes care 
of most of the performance, and does it in a way en- 
tirely impossible for the higher conscious life — the 
life of conscious control. 

Habit reduces the amount 0) fatigue resulting from 



Habit 47 

certain activities. This is due partly to the fact that 
the habitual activities are simpler and more accurate, 
and thus the number of necessary movements is re- 
duced ; but it is not entirely due to these things. After 
an out-of-door vacation of three months the student be- 
comes fearfully fatigued during the first days of school. 
After ten months of school the student becomes 
greatly fatigued for the first days of vacation if he 
takes up any ordinary form of manual labor. In a 
little while he will be able to labor all day, week in 
and week out, without great fatigue. The movements 
have in a certain sense become habitual. The child 
practicing at the piano cannot stay there for long at a 
time, but the trained, practiced, habitual pianist will 
play with little fatigue for hours at a time. 

Habit makes for conservatism. The bright young 
fellow whose schooling has been limited to a few 
months during childhood, seems happy and contented 
as he goes about his daily task of drudgery. He per- 
sonally knows no other life ; this one has become ha- 
bitual to him ; it practically never occurs to him that 
another is possible. Professor James in his "Psy- 
chology" puts it thus: — 

"Habit is the enormous fly wheel of society, its most 
precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us 



48 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children 
of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It 
alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of 
life from being deserted by those brought up to tread 
therein. It keeps the fisherman and deckhand at sea 
through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and 
nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm 
through all the months of sorrow; it protects us from in- 
vasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. 
It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines 
of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best 
of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for 
which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It 
keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the 
age of twenty-five you can see the professional mannerisms 
settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the 
young doctor, on the young minister, on the young coun- 
selor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running 
through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, 
the ways of the shop, in a word, from which the man can 
by and by no more escape than his coat sleeve can sud- 
denly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best 
he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most 
of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, 
and will never soften again." 

Habit is the basis 0) practical jaith in things and men. 
Without any question of the ceiling falling in upon us, 
we daily assemble in large numbers in recitation rooms, 



Habit 49 

churches, and lecture halls. We have been in the 
habit of doing this and the ceilings have been in the 
habit of keeping their places. We never stop to ques- 
tion the probable risk of doing such a thing. Unless 
the danger signal is up, we cross bridges without taking 
thought. We have done this without question so long 
and the bridge has kept its place for us so faithfully 
that we put implicit, although probably not conscious, 
faith in its proper behavior and our ultimate suc- 
cess in crossing it again. Most men generally speak 
the truth. The habit of the people is to make their 
language represent more or less accurately the facts 
which they profess to portray or to express. My be- 
havior is largely based upon my faith in such habits 
of the people. I make my arrangements to leave 
town at the hour announced by the time-table. I 
dress for dinner at the time announced by the hotel 
directions. I attend church at the hour announced. I 
believe 'that the scheduled thing will happen at the 
time set. I believe that men have told the truth; 
that, in such matters at least, the habit of the people 
is to tell the truth, and I express my practical faith 
by acting accordingly. I give notes and take notes; 
I give deeds for property and take them; I pay life 
insurance and my rent in advance because I believe 



50 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

in certain faithfulnesses on the part of individuals and 
organized societies ; and this faithfulness is based 
upon certain habits of action by individuals and or- 
ganized societies, which I have repeatedly observed. 

Habit makes for progress. Paradoxical as it may 
seem at first thought, all progress is based upon con- 
servatism, upon holding the ground already gained. 
If we did only new things as the new days come, or 
if we did old things in new ways only, we should ac- 
complish little and progress not at all. The great ball 
pitcher, the great organist, the great accountant, the 
great executive, is not the person who tries one thing 
one day and another the next, but is the person who 
selects out of the many possible ways the one best 
suited to himself and his work, and does it that way 
day after day and year after year. All hope of prog- 
ress lies in conserved habits, in dismissing to the lower 
centers activities which were formerly under the di- 
rection of the higher, conscious control, thus leaving 
the higher centers free for more advanced and complex 
work. There is no hope for the student of mathe- 
matics so long as he does the multiplication table with 
his higher centers ; such an alphabet of the subject 
should have gone down, and the head should be free 
for the relations of the problem. There is no hope 



Habit 51 

for the public speaker who is obliged to attend con- 
sciously to the grammar and pronunciation of his 
speech ; such things should have become habitual, 
and the lower centers should be unerring in producing 
the right form of expression. And the man or woman 
who cannot strike off at once the answer to most practi- 
cal moral questions as they arise from day to day is 
greatly handicapped. The habit of appropriate re- 
actions should be so deeply ground into the individual 
that decisions upon such matters will be prompt and 
correct. 

Now habit, in all these respects which we have been 
considering, may make or mar the individual, and 
which it shall do depends upon one thing only, viz. 
whether these habits which are more than "second 
nature" are for us or against us; whether they are 
our allies or our enemies. They are equally powerful 
whichever way they pull. If they pull with us, for 
our highest good, who or what can successfully stand 
out against us? But if they pull against us, where 
in all the earth can we gain reenforcement strong 
enough and steadfast enough to help us win the battle 
against them? One large standard, at least, is here 
set for the parent, the teacher, and the more mature 
student. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WORK 

In writing to the Philippians St. Paul in one of his 
letters admonished them to work out their own salva- 
tion with fear and trembling. He realized, and wanted 
them to realize, that much of a man's fitness for sal- 
vation is brought about by the work he does; and so 
in the epistle of James, he says, "Faith without works 
is dead." Fundamental as is faith in the accomplish- 
ment of merely temporal ends, to say nothing of the 
Kingdom of God, he realized that under normal con- 
ditions the measure of one's faith is the work which 
results from it. 

Psychology says at least this much: "One's tem- 
poral salvation and one's final fitness for eternal sal- 
vation are determined largely by the work one does, 
the motive behind it, and the spirit carried into it." 

A person is as large as the thing he does, but no 
larger. One's own doing is the expressed side of his 
life, and this is the only side that can be read, and, 
therefore, the only side to be spoken of by the psy- 

52 



The Psychology of Work 53 

chologist with any degree of assurance. Aside from 
a person's inheritance, which is always an important 
factor but one over which he has no control, his phys- 
ical, mental, and spiritual development and efficiency 
are directly due more to the work he does than to all 
other things combined. One's trade or profession 
finally settles down all over him and the marks of his 
calling are unmistakable. In the process of forging 
out a piece of the world's work he has forged out his 
own particular manner of man. 

The old educational maxim, "We learn to do by 
doing," has a whole truth, a half truth, or a whole 
falsehood in it, depending entirely upon one's inter- 
pretation. If it means that we learn to do certain 
definite things by doing those things or other very 
closely related things, then it possesses a whole truth. 
If it means that we cannot learn to do anything unless 
we actually do something, it possesses half a truth. 
It is correct in its assertion of the importance of doing, 
but is not defined in its objects. But if it means, as 
probably most teachers have interpreted it, that we 
learn to do anything by doing something, it is not 
only void of truth, but positively false. 

So far is it from being true that we get general doing 
ability by doing some one thing well, that the truth 



54 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

is diametrically the opposite, viz. that by doing cer- 
tain definite, specific things well, we to a certain degree 
become incapacitated for doing other definite, specific, 
but unrelated things well. The field for illustration 
here is wide. Bergstrom has shown this truth by the 
use of cards. A stack of different figured cards, after 
being carefully shuffled, was thrown in books, each 
book containing all cards bearing the same figure or 
sign. The plan was to find in what length of time 
he would be able thus to throw the cards. During 
the first series of trials the books always came in the 
same order, say — i, 2, 3, 4. At the end of each trial 
the time was noted, and after the subject had rested, 
another trial was made. The point, of course, was to 
reach the minimum of time and maximum of skill in 
doing over and over again this one thing in exactly 
the same way. A little progress was noticed from 
beginning to finish, but there came a time when re- 
peated efforts resulted in no gains, and so this first 
series of the experiment ended. After ample time 
for complete rest from fatigue, a second series of trials 
was made, with the introduction of but one variation; 
this time the order of the books of cards was different. 
Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, the order may have been 2, 1, 4, 3. 
Here was the same subject with the experience com- 



The Psychology of Work 55 

ing from his first long series of trials doing practically 
what he had before been doing time and time again. 
What we find is instructive and significant, viz. that 
the first time the cards were thrown in the second 
series the time required was greater than for the first 
trial in the first series; and so throughout the entire 
second series, each trial required more time than the 
corresponding trial in the first series. Furthermore it 
was found that to reach the minimum of time and 
maximum of skill in the second series required more 
trials and more time than in the first. Here we find 
a man to a degree handicapped in doing a thing which 
was very closely related to what he had been doing. 
He would have done better at the second task had he 
not done the first at all. 

In athletics a promising sprinter, who is transferred 
from the sprinting event to the pole vault event, finds 
that after a season of faithful, consistent training for 
pole vaulting he requires more time to make the hun- 
dred yards dash. It might be supposed that since he 
had spent the year in systematic training as an athlete 
he would, at all events, hold his own as a sprinter; 
but not so — new movements have been formed at 
the expense of old ones, new muscular combinations 
have been confirmed and he is to a degree an incapaci- 



56 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

tated machine for any performance except the one for 
which he has taken definite training. What one does 
— one's work — settles down all over him like a 
plaster of Paris cast, or all through him like iron in 
the blood, and so it comes to be that a person is as 
large as the work he does. 

In personal development there is no substitute for 
work. The great artists have known this, and among 
the greatest of them have been men who not only put 
the finishing touches upon the stone, but actually 
quarried the stone from the mountain side. We 
speak of brainy statesmen, ministers, financiers. No 
one who has brains will doubt that brains count, but 
a truer way to classify such men would be upon the 
basis of industry. Of course our greatest statesmen, 
our wisest and most influential churchmen, and our 
most successful business men are men of brains, and 
yet I fancy that they do not have a corner on the 
brains in their particular fields of activity ; but we can 
hardly find their equals in energy, in the amount of 
work they do. Many a man, deservedly unheard of, 
has started with as good brain capital as any of these, 
but has failed to realize upon himself through hard work. 

There is no substitute for hard work. Luck is no 
substitute. Brilliancy is no substitute. The man who 



The Psychology of Work 57 

is doomed to be unlucky is the one who believes in 
luck; and what is apt to prove one of the greatest 
curses in the world is the so-called blessing of ver- 
satility — the ability to do, without training, many 
things passably well. Such a versatile man is, as a 
rule, doomed to mediocrity, doomed to be a dabbler 
in many things and a success at none. Being able 
to do any one of many things fairly well, he too often 
prefers to change from one to another, when he finds 
himself outclassed by those who are especially pre- 
pared to excel. 

The success which many men with limited " school- 
ing " have had is due more than to anything else to 
habits of systematic work at something that is worth 
while. Many a listless, careless student would re- 
ceive greater help, better preparation for his life's 
work, if he were taken from school at once and put 
to a task that demands application and thoroughness. 
Unless the school offers opportunities for such appli- 
cation and thoroughness and insists upon the student's 
living up to his opportunity, it misses its main chance 
in child saving. 

When Booker T. Washington reached Hampton 
Institute, he was such a sorry specimen that it was 
questionable whether he should be admitted. It was 



58 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the recognized mission of the school to reach down 
and out, to bring in and teach the poor and ignorant 
black people, but the reach to Washington seemed 
a long one indeed. He persisted, however, and was 
finally given a chance. In telling of his introduction 
to the Institute, Mr. Washington has said: — 

"When I reached Hampton and presented myself as 
a candidate for^ admission to the school, the instructors 
who saw me at first were not at all certain that they cared 
to enroll me as a pupil, a fact at which I do not wonder as 
I remember the appearance I must have presented to them. 
It had taken considerable time for me to make the journey 
over the mountains. I had walked a good share of the 
way, and had often slept in barns, before I had occupied 
my lodging under the sidewalk in Richmond. My clothes 
had been none too good when I started; they were much 
worse when I reached my journey's end. I wanted to 
stay, and pleaded to be allowed to do so ! I said I would 
work. They wanted to know what I could do. I told 
them what I had been doing. Finally one of the instructors 
took me to a room which needed sweeping, gave me a 
broom, and told me to see how well I could clean the room. 
I suppose that I swept and dusted that room as many as 
four or five times before I was satisfied with it. Then one 
of the lady teachers came and inspected my work, and 
reported that it was satisfactory. That was my entrance 
examination. I passed it successfully, and was allowed 
to stay." 



The Psychology of Work 59 

But where had Mr. Washington been prepared 
for the examination ? Listen to his own words : "Not 
far from here, Charleston, in the family of a noble 
white woman whom most of you know, I received a 
training in the matters of thoroughness, cleanliness, 
promptness, and honesty, which, I confess to you, in 
a large measure, enables me to do the work for which 
I am given credit. As I look over my life I feel that 
the training which I received in the family of Mrs. Viola 
Ruffner, was a most valuable part of my education." 

There can be no doubt that the magnificent work 
which Booker T. Washington has done for his people, 
and incidentally for his country, is the direct result 
of this early training in the systematic and complete 
performance of every task, however menial. There is 
positively no substitute for consistent, persistent hard 
work at something that needs to be done. 

Professor Hodge, of Clark University, found that 
tramps set to odd jobs about the house or grounds 
know practically nothing about work; they do not 
know how to do anything right. I do not mean to 
say that the schools are responsible for this. I mean 
to say only that the shortage of character in these 
cases is the more or less direct outcome of improper 
training in childhood, of failure to learn to do things 



60 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

and do them well, and that this hints strongly at what 
the school might attempt to do in order to forestall 
such results. 

Those who have been most successful in the refor- 
mation of youthful criminals have magnified system- 
atic work as a curative for criminality. Generally 
speaking, the plan has been for the superintendent 
or director to ascertain as fully as possible by all 
legitimate direct and indirect means just what is the 
convict's capacity for work along different lines, intel- 
lectual, mental, or physical. This comes first, and 
sufficient time is taken to do it well. Then certain 
tasks known to be within the capability of the convict 
are assigned, with the directions, stated or implied, 
that they are to be accomplished to the best of the 
workman's ability. Here exceptional judgment and 
firmness on the part of the superintendent are required. 
The convict soon learns that dinner time, or supper 
time, or bedtime never comes until the task is done 
satisfactorily; done in such a way as to satisfy the 
superintendent that it has been done as well as the 
given convict is able to do it. Years of this sort of 
discipline result in two things: (i) ability to do cer- 
tain things better than the average citizen of any com- 
munity can do them, and (2) therefore, liking for 



The Psychology of Work 61 

tasks and interest in doing them. In ninety per cent 
of such cases the reform is accomplished when this 
twofold result has been attained — skill in doing some- 
thing and interest in it. The business of the school 
is formation, but if it would bear in mind this twofold 
ideal, there would be less need for reformation later 
in the child's life. 

One thing that should never be lost sight of in all 
training is that the greatest thing done, the most im- 
portant result reached in one's work is the accomplish- 
ment of the worker. The largest thing a person does 
in all his doing is the making of himself. When a 
child has been allowed to loaf through a school course, 
his attainments are not what they should be, but this 
is of comparatively little importance; the important 
result is that the habit of loafing has been confirmed, 
and the school turns out a loafer and not a worker — 
it turns out one whose tendencies are toward tramp- 
dom and not toward productive, independent citizenship. 

Regardless of the particular course of study a child 
follows, his own making or unmaking depends upon 
the completeness and exactness of performance, and 
the absence of mere approximation. And so it is in 
regard to the much-mooted question of change of cur- 
riculum. No doubt many adjustments need to be 



62 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

made, but this never can be a question of more than 
secondary importance. The thing of overshadowing, 
all-pervading importance, let it be repeated, is com- 
pleteness and exactness of performance. This is the 
kind of work that accomplishes the workman. When 
people grasp this fact, they will from sheer selfishness, 
if from no higher motive, do their best; it will be a 
matter of self-preservation and self-realization with 
them to do fully and perfectly everything they under- 
take. Then the superintendent can take up his office 
duties, confident that there will be no shirking teachers ; 
then the shopper will be sure of full measure, and the 
housewife need not worry about adulterated food 
stuffs. When people fully realize that every time an 
arm is reached out (literally or figuratively) to do a 
thing, one end of the arm is attached to the doer and 
works upon him as truly as the other end works upon 
the canvas or the washboard, they will begin to ap- 
preciate the reflexive effect which work has upon the 
worker — they will see how much one's own character 
is the direct answer to one's own life of action or be- 
havior. For such an individual work will at once 
become a means to character as an end, and people 
will set about to work out their own salvation with 
fear and trembling. 



CHAPTER VII 

MEMORY 

No question in the entire realm of psychology has 
received so much attention as memory, and probably 
no subject in the fields of both science and speculation 
has been more erroneously discussed. 

To get at anything like an accurate conception 
of memory, two things at least need to be noted: 
(i) People differ very greatly in their ability to recall 
isolated, disconnected events or things. Some people 
with apparently little or no effort recall dates, places, 
names, and all kinds of disconnected matters. This 
is what Morgan calls Desultory Memory. Those 
who can do this thing in this way have always been 
able to do it ; they have not acquired it. They do not 
know how they do it. There is no "how." If there 
were, it would no longer be Desultory but would be- 
come Systematic Memory. The "how" makes it 
Systematic. It follows that Desultory Memory can- 
not, as such, be cultivated, for cultivation introduces 

63 



64 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

a method, which constitutes it at once as Systematic 
and not Desultory. (2) Memory is a resultant. Mem- 
ory is not positive in the sense that it is a faculty or 
an activity with which we do something. Memory is, 
to put it flatly, what happens because something 
else has happened. It is the answer, the fruitage, 
the resultant. Memory does not stand on its own feet, 
so to speak. It cannot in itself be cultivated. Mem- 
ory training, at least, is a misnomer. Memory never 
has been trained and never will be trained. It is a 
resultant and not a process. . In training children in 
accuracy and speed in addition, the training comes in 
the process of arriving at the answer and not in the 
answer itself. 

Individuals, of course, vary greatly in their power 
of retentiveness due to difference in nervous plasticity, 
which cannot be changed. The problem of good re- 
taining for a given individual is nothing more or less 
than the problem of good getting. Good getting by 
the pupil implies good teaching by the teacher. In 
general, good getting and good teaching consist of two 
things only — the application 0) the subject under con- 
sideration to all sides 0] the child., and the application 
0) all sides 0) the subject to the child. This principle 
must not be overlooked. Some subjects lend them- 



Memory 65 

selves to much more varied treatment than others. 
The wise teacher will see the limitations of each. 

First, then, as far as possible, the subject should ap- 
peal to all sides of the child. Many city born and bred 
children, while in school, know the definitions and 
uses of our common agricultural plants, and many 
of them know, in a general way, plant distribution 
throughout the world; but their information, if such 
it may be called, does not stick, and we say they do not 
re-member well. Our diagnosis is wrong. They did 
not in the first place member well. If the subject 
had been taught in such a way as to appeal to all 
sides of the child, he would not have forgotten it. He 
could not have forgotten it. If the child could have 
seen, tasted, smelled, and handled these agricultural 
products, and actually have witnessed the use to which 
they could be put, if the processes of preparation had 
been adequate, the information would have stuck. 
He could not by any effort have forgotten it. And 
then we should say that he remembers well, which of 
course is true; but the large truth psychologically is 
that he had membered it well in the getting, with the 
result that he could not forget it. Memory is a re- 
sultant. Good holding depends upon good getting. 

Second , all sides of the subject under consideration 



66 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

should be presented to the child if we expect him to 
grasp it, and so retain it. The child should see the 
thing in all its relations — the relations of place, time, 
cause and effect, whole and part. Much of the his- 
tory work in schools, for example, is lost because each 
subject is taken up as a separate, isolated topic in no 
way related to what has gone before or to what fol- 
lows; and then children are credited with having poor 
memories for history. We expect them to re- member 
things which had never been membered. We expect 
them to hold things which they never had. We 
expect them to retain things which they had never 
attained. 

As the Constitution of the United States is usually 
taught in our public schools, not one child in a thou- 
sand remembers a single thing that is worth while. 
He has not known anything worth while. He may 
have committed the document to memory as he would 
a declamation, but that is far from knowing it. To 
know a thing is to get it in its relations. What were 
the forces which made it, and what were the forces 
which it made? What was peculiar to the place and 
time which made the thing practically inevitable? Of 
what larger movement is it a part and what are the 
important parts or phases of it as a movement? 



Memory 67 

A presupposition for remembering the Constitution 
is that it should have been known, and a necessary 
condition for knowing it is that it should have been 
seen in its relations. All sides of it should have ap- 
pealed to the learner. The Constitution must be 
seen as the general instrument of government result- 
ing from hundreds of years of conflict and develop- 
ment. In it must be seen the old navigation laws, 
the Stamp Act and its repeal, the Mutiny Act, the 
Colonial and Continental congresses, the Boston Tea 
Party, the Boston Massacre, Lexington and Concord, 
Bunker Hill, the Declaration of Independence, the 
Articles of Confederation, the numerous attempts to 
remodel the Articles, Valley Forge, the surrender at 
Yorktown. Unless these things can be seen as contrib- 
uting finally to this result, the spirit and genius, and 
therefore the significance, of the Constitution are 
lost; it is not comprehended and so is not retained. 

And likewise the significance of the Constitution 
cannot be comprehended unless we know it as the in- 
strument of government under which our history as a 
nation has been made. The questions which have 
arisen in our national history are to be determined in 
the light of this general instrument of government, 
and the Constitution itself can be understood only as 



68 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

we see its mark upon all important questions of state 
since its adoption. The only way to know a law fully 
is to make it operative. So it is with the Constitution, 
the general law of the land. It not only stands as the 
great generalized effect of the years that had gone 
before, but it stands out as the great semi- cause of the 
events which followed. The Kentucky and the Virginia 
Resolutions, the Hartford Convention, the Missouri 
Compromise, the Monroe Doctrine, the Acts of Nulli- 
fication, the Wilmot Proviso, the Omnibus Bill, the 
Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott Decision, the Act 
of Secession, Reconstruction, the Income Tax, are all 
constitutional questions, and no one can know the 
Constitution who does not see its marks on all such 
questions. 

This illustration has been given thus fully, not as a 
lesson in history, but in order to show what is meant 
by presenting a topic in its relations. The purpose is to 
illustrate one phase of the Psychology of Memory, viz. 
that good holding depends upon good getting; and 
that one phase of good getting consists in presenting 
to the learner the subject under consideration in as 
many of its relations as possible. 

Other things being equal, vividness, recency, and rep- 
etition in presentation strengthen retention. Through 



Memory 69 

vividness, one remembers his first sunset at sea, the 
features of his first-born child, his veiled bride, the 
agonized expression on the condemned man's face. 
The emotional tone was such that the experience 
burned itself in at once, never to be lost — because of 
the way in which it was gotten. Recency is an im- 
portant factor only in that things have not had time to 
fade out since their acquirement, and repetition means 
nothing more than getting the same thing over and 
over again. 

If good getting, full comprehension, is the secret of 
good retention, it becomes apparent at once how im- 
portant it is that the avenues for the transmission of 
the raw stuff of information should be kept in their 
normal state. The child's eyes and ears should be as 
much the special care of the teacher as the recita- 
tion or discipline; even more so, for these are funda- 
mental; they are the presuppositions of all intelligence 
and should, therefore, be the first concern of parent 
and teacher. 

A great deal has been said about eye-mindedness 

— ability to recall visual images, and ear-mindedness 

— ability to recall auditory images, to say nothing of 
olfactory, gustatory, and motor images. 

People vary greatly in their power to image in terms 



70 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

of the various senses. Professor James gives the 
case of a man who could not get the visual image of 
his family at the breakfast table. He remembers the 
order in which they sit at the table, but cannot, as we 
say, see them. He has no image. Many of my own 
students cannot image their mothers' faces. They 
remember that they have dark or light complexion, 
that they are of a certain height, that they have such 
and such features, but they have no distinct image. 
Others, however, think that the image is almost as 
complete and vivid as the impression itself. Many 
who have poor or no visual images have well-developed 
auditory images, and many, of course, have not. 
Many of my own students are sure that they have 
gustatory and olfactory images, but as many are just 
as sure that they have not. Practically all have motor 
images, but in varying degrees of perfection. 

In pedagogy more attention has been given to the 
various types of mental imagery than should have 
been. It does not follow that because a child is strong 
in one type, he should be developed along this line. 
If mastering a topic is the aim of school work, if this 
is the end of education, of course let the child do it 
in the easiest way; but if the aim of school work, the 
end of education, is the development of the child, the 



Memory 71 

easy method of mastery might very well defeat the end. 
Because a child is "born long" at one place and "born 
short" at another, it does not follow that he should be 
made longer at the long places and shorter at the 
short ones. If the all-round development of the child 
is the thing to be attained, it might be better peda- 
gogy to train him where he is short. The objective 
results in the way of subject-matter mastered would 
be less satisfactory, but there should be more of child 
saving. Furthermore, Halleck has wisely called our 
attention to the fact that the data, for example, for 
visual imagery are not necessarily or usually gotten 
through the eye. The child hears a vivid description 
of the streets of Yokohama and at once forms a visual 
image of the city. Knowing that the child is rich in 
visual imagery, we cannot assume that this imagery 
is the result of teaching through the eye. 

The only safe and sane attitude to take is that the 
child starts with a given capital, and that he, the center 
of the educational process, is to be made strong at as 
many points as possible; that the way to do this is 
not to appeal constantly to him where he is long, 
neither where he is short, but to present the work in 
such a way as to appeal to as many sides as possible. 

Systematic Memory has its basis in the laws of asso- 



72 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

ciation; psychical association depends directly upon 
the physical habits of the brain; the physical habits 
of the brain are determined by its plasticity and the 
variety of its stimulations. Neurology teaches us that 
the native plasticity of nervous matter cannot be 
changed. It follows, therefore, that our only means 
of affecting the memory is through the variety of 
stimulations. The greatest variety comes through the 
double process of letting the thing appeal to all sides 
of the individual, and by letting all sides of the thing 
appeal to the individual. Such a process is good 
teaching by the teacher, which is the most he can do 
toward good getting by the pupil; and good getting is 
the most the pupil can do to insure good retention. 
Such is the only legitimate memory work that can be 
done in the schoolroom. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT 

Modern science has shown that there are times in 
the development of all living things — plants, animals, 
and people — when certain things can be done better 
than they could ever have been done before, and better 
than they can be done at any future time; that there 
are certain "ripe times" or "nascent stages" in the 
careers of all living things, and that if these stages are 
not recognized when they manifest themselves, the 
tendency is that their advantages will be lost. The 
individual will lose his appetite or desire, or he will 
lose his aptitude, and it may be that he will lose both 
his appetite and his aptitude. If the broken arm is 
not exercised from day to day, but is allowed to re- 
main in the sling week after week unused, there will 
come a time very soon when it will have passed all 
possibility of ever functioning normally again. If the 
twig that grows through the fence is allowed to do so 
year after year, there will come a time when it is for- 
ever too late to make it grow straight. There was a 

73 



74 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

time when the kinks might have been straightened 
out, but failure to seize upon this time doomed the 
twig to become a crooked and unshapely tree. This 
principle manifests itself alike in those things which 
make for strength and those which make for weakness. 
Spalding found that if chicks coming from the shell 
should be hooded at once, and not allowed to exercise 
the instinct to feed themselves within the first few hours 
after hatching, they would require a longer time to 
learn to feed themselves than if they had not been 
hooded. He found that the extra time required for 
this accomplishment was exactly proportional to the 
length of time the chicks remained hooded. He 
says : — 

"A chicken that has not heard the call of the mother 
until eight or ten days old, then hears it as if it heard it 
not. I regret to find that on this point my notes are not 
so full as I could wish, or as they might have been. There 
is, however, an account of one chicken that could not be 
returned to the mother when ten days old. The hen fol- 
lowed it, and tried to entice it in every way; still, it con- 
tinually left her and ran to the house or to any person of 
whom it caught sight. This it persisted in doing, though 
beaten back with a small branch dozens of times, and, 
indeed, cruelly maltreated. It was also placed under 
the mother at night, but it again left her in the morning." 



Arrested Development 75 

In the laboratory at Clark University I have con- 
firmed practically all of Spalding's experiments upon 
this point. The only legitimate conclusion to be 
drawn is that if young chicks are prevented from act- 
ing upon even so fundamental an instinct as feeding 
themselves when the instinct first manifests itself, the 
tendency will be for them to lose the instinct entirely. 
This is doubtless just as true of the young of all ani- 
mals. I have on record many cases of a similar kind 
as applied to children in their development. 

Professor James makes the following observations: 

"If a boy grows up alone at the age of games and sports 
and learns neither to play ball, nor row, nor sail, nor ride, 
nor skate, nor fish, nor shoot, probably he will be sedentary 
to the end of his days; and, though the best opportunities 
be afforded him for learning these things later, it is a hun- 
dred to one that he will pass them by and shrink back 
from the effort of taking those necessary first steps, the 
prospect of which, at an earlier age, would have filled him 
with eager delight. The sexual passion expires after a 
protracted reign; but it is well known that its peculiar 
manifestations in a given individual depend almost entirely 
on the habits he may form during the early period of its 
activity. Exposure to bad company then makes him a 
loose liver all his days ; chastity kept at first makes the same 
easy later on. In all pedagogy the great thing is to strike 



y6 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the iron while hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil's 
interest in each successive subject before its ebb has come, 
so that knowledge. may be got and a habit of skill acquired 
— a headway of interest, in short, secured, on which after- 
ward the individual may float. There is a happy moment 
for fixing skill, for making boys collectors in natural history, 
and presently dissectors and botanists; then for initiating 
them into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders 
of physical and chemical law. ... In each of us a satu- 
ration point is soon reached in all of these things, the im- 
petus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless 
the topic be one associated with some urgent personal need 
that keeps our wits constantly whetted about it, we settle 
into an equilibrium, and live on what we learned when our 
interest was fresh and instinctive without adding to the 
store. ... If by chance we ever do learn anything about 
some entirely new topic, we are afflicted with a strange 
sense of insecurity, and we fear to advance a resolute 
opinion. But with things learned in the plastic days of 
instinctive curiosity we never lose entirely our sense of 
being at home." 

For years I have asked teachers to report cases 
which have come within their personal knowledge, of 
children who at some time had given evidence of pe- 
culiar strength or liking for some particular kind of 
activity, but who were prevented from developing in 
this line, with the result that the strength or the liking, 



Arrested Development 77 

or both, were lost. Most cases come within the fields 
of drawing, the rudiments of art, and music. Two 
typical cases are as follows : — 

"When I was a young child, I showed such skill in 
drawing that my friends predicted that I would develop 
into a great artist. When I entered school at the age of 
six, my parents told me I must not draw pictures in school. 
I found the book work in school dry and uninteresting, 
and I fell to drawing pictures. The teacher told me that 
school was no place to draw pictures and that I must study 
my book. I did so ; but from time to time I relapsed until 
the teacher punished me severely. I desisted from draw- 
ing the remainder of the school term, but suffered a relapse 
at the opening of school the next year under another teacher. 
My experience this year was similar to that of the year 
before. My father and mother insisted that it was very 
wrong to draw pictures in school and often repeated the 
school punishment. I finally gave it up altogether and 
did not draw another picture for more than six years. 
When I finished the common schools, I was licensed to 
teach and taught one year before going to the Normal 
School. One requirement in the geography work at this 
normal school was map drawing. I was obliged to draw 
the map of North America. My map was a good one. 
I had not lost my skill, but I have never done a piece of 
work in school or out of school that I disliked to do so 
much. I have not drawn a picture or map since and shall 
never do so unless required to do so as a student. I hate 



78 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the very thought of drawing or anything that pertains 
to it." 

Surely this child had been compelled to sin away 
her chance. Another teacher gives the following : — 

"I knew two little girls ten years of age who were cousins. 
When I became acquainted with them, both could sing well 
and both were very fond of music, vocal and instrumental. 
Both wished to take lessons on the piano. Apparently 
the parents in neither case were able to purchase a 
piano and employ a teacher. In a short time, however, 
the parents of one child did so, and for eight years, in 
addition to her school work, which has been exceptionally 
strong, she has been a close student of the piano, and has 
developed into an accomplished pianist, finding her greatest 
pleasure in her music. The parents of the other child 
would not do this. The piano cost too much and it made 
too much noise anyway. When their daughter grew to 
womanhood, she might purchase a piano with her own 
money if she wished to do so. For years she begged for 
the opportunities of her cousin, but to no effect. To-day 
she knows practically nothing about music and the pity 
is she cares nothing for it." 

Every one knows with what facility a young child 
will pick up the mother tongue under normal condi- 
tions, and how readily a young child will pick up a 
foreign language when living in a foreign country. 



Arrested Development 79 

It is a matter of common observation, however, that 
a child born of German parents and brought into an 
English-speaking country in infancy has the same 
difficulty in adulthood in mastering the German lan- 
guage that an English-born person has, unless German 
has been the language of the family; and it is also a 
matter of common observation, especially in college 
and university life, that people who do not begin the 
study of the foreign languages until after maturity 
have, as a rule, great difficulty in getting a good 
working knowledge of them, and very few ever be- 
come proficient. School superintendents and teachers 
should have this in mind in planning courses of study, 
and introduce the study of foreign languages into the 
course very early. In the United States the age of 
ten is not too young to begin such work. Students 
need to bear the same fact in mind, and thus avoid 
the postponement of language work until it is too late 
to do it with comparative ease and proficiency. 

The study of religious experience shows that this 
same principle holds true there as elsewhere. More 
than eighty- five per cent of the people who take the 
stand for higher life through conversion, by coming 
into the church or in some other way, do so between 
the ages of thirteen and nineteen. These early years 



80 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

seem to be ripe years for such experience. Never in 
the life of the individual has there been such a ripe 
time for such experience, and never again will there 
be. Men grown old out of the faith are able almost 
invariably to look back to their "teens" when they 
had the inward promptings to a "higher life," but 
through failure to act upon such promptings they 
finally lost them. 

Observation and experiment confirm the judgment 
that in all forms of life and in all life experiences there 
are times when certain things can be done better than 
they ever could have been done before, and better than 
they can ever be done in the future. Furthermore, 
that if the ripe time or nascent stage is not acted upon, 
the tendency, at least, will be for the liking or the apti- 
tude for the particular activity to be lost. In many 
cases both are lost. 

In the schoolroom two very common ways of induc- 
ing arrest of development are: (i) The grafting of too 
complex forms upon a comparatively weak and unde- 
veloped nervous system, or mind, i.e. by crowding the 
pupil beyond his years and his mental and physical 
strength. There seems to be little doubt that the 
child can, through pressure, bring into use stored 
energy, vital force, which should be held in reserva- 



Arrested Development 81 

tion for future years, for growth or functioning. This 
is, of course, nothing more or less than killing the 
goose that laid the golden eggs. If the little girl 
burns up the blood in her cheeks through self- con- 
sciousness, she can't have it for her children when 
she reaches womanhood. (2) The holding of pupils 
too long to simple forms. Kindergarten methods are 
good only for young children. The child who is taught 
to think in the concrete is doomed as a thinker if he 
is held too long to the concrete. 

It is true that no one can progress who has not mas- 
tered the rudiments of his business, but it is equally 
true that no one can progress who knows only the 
rudiments. The novelty and the interest in much 
school work are lost by moving too slowly and repeat- 
ing too often. As the child develops, the thing he 
does must develop in complexity and difficulty, and if 
he is held too long to the simple forms, the tendency 
will be for him to become ''simple- minded." 



CHAPTER IX 

INTEREST AND ATTENTION 

In recent years no subject has received so much 
attention in educational circles as that of interest. 
With many it is made the center of the entire process 
of education. The Herbartian psychology and peda- 
gogy, so widely represented in this country, have em- 
phasized the importance of interest, and the movement 
known as child study has brought out with equal 
emphasis the need of directing our work along the 
lines of the natural interests of the child. So far as 
is known by the writer everything that has been said 
on this point by both of these schools of pedagogy 
is true and worthy of attention. Every one knows 
that close and continued attention is conditioned by 
the amount of genuine interest one has in the subject, 
and so it is considered good pedagogy for the teacher 
to observe and study her children enough to find out 
what are the primary interests at different ages and of 
different children. It can be seen at once that if this 
principle were carried out in the extreme, it would mean 

82 



Interest and Attention 83 

individual teaching for every child. But, on the other 
hand, it is thought that great good is derived by the 
child from work in the class. Perhaps not quite so 
much Latin or arithmetic will be acquired as under 
the individual plan, but the good derived from the 
class associations, the give and take, the performance 
of tasks in the presence of one's associates, surely has 
as great value for the child as the few additional chap- 
ters in Latin or pages in arithmetic which he might 
have mastered working alone. 

It would be rash to suppose that the interests of all 
the members of a class or even of any two members 
are identical, however well the classification be made. 
This means at least two things. In the first place, 
classification should be as flexible as possible so that 
the child's natural interest will not be entirely crushed 
out of him. In the second place, if the child derives 
a benefit from class work to be gotten in no other way, 
he must apply himself at times to work in which he 
does not find a very great interest. 

In the child's play, it has been argued, — and justly, 
I think, — the spontaneity of the child should be 
recognized. The play ideal for young children is 
unhampered, unorganized, undirected, spontaneous 
play. Yet every one knows that, however gratifying 



84 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

it is to the country boy to throw stones in all directions 
he cannot do this when he moves into the city. So- 
ciety, as well as the individual, has its rights. But 
this does not militate against the doctrine of interest 
in itself. If it is true that the best thing for my child 
is to live a perfectly free, spontaneous, uncurbed life, 
and if such living cannot be tolerated in the city, it 
becomes at once imperative to leave the city. But 
here we must take account of the interests of parents 
and older brothers and sisters, which may be just as 
natural as those of the younger ones and which can 
be gratified only by city life. So, while the doctrine of 
interest is well worthy the attention which it receives, 
and while it is a splendid ideal too little realized, it is 
very doubtful whether it can stand alone as the center 
of educational theory and practice. 

Let us turn to another phase of the subject which 
has received very little attention, but which is fraught 
with as much pedagogical significance as any fact of 
modern pedagogy. It is this: interest results from 
attention. A little insight into a subject is absolutely 
necessary before an interest in it can be awakened. 
Interest before insight through some form of attention 
is impossible. 

Educational psychologies usually show how it is 



Interest and Attention 85 

that we attend to whatever is interesting, but where 
is to be found a statement of the equally true and valu- 
able fact that we are apt to become interested in what- 
ever we attend to? It is in the intellectual world 
somewhat as in the physical world. A little time spent 
in introspection and in questioning your friends will 
reveal the fact that the food stuff you have learned to 
eat is the one for which you have the greatest appetite 
and which you crave most. The person for whom 
bananas were nauseating but who persisted in eating 
them is the one most apt to be a banana fiend. Ask 
the eaters of celery and parsnips. Few men addicted 
to the use of tobacco escaped the first sickness and 
enjoyed the taste of it from the start. In short, the 
things we like best are apt to be the things that we 
have learned to like. Analogously we may learn to 
like things mentally for which we seemed to have no 
natural mental appetite. It is no uncommon thing 
to hear a person say, "There was a time when I dis- 
liked grammar (or arithmetic or history or Latin), 
but now it is my favorite study. I not only enjoy it 
most, but find that I can accomplish more in it than 
in any other line of work." One illustration I have in 
mind is that of a young man who studied psychology 
four years, doing good work but not having his chief 



S6 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

interest in it. lie was asked to teach the subject, 
and went at it with unbounded energy. He held him- 
self right to it. He looked at it from this standpoint 
and that. He used his pedagogical skill in present- 
ing it to his students. Thus he got a grasp of the sub- 
ject to be gained only by long, sustained work. With 
this there came a new and heretofore unknown interest 
in the subject, so that when he entered the university 
he elected the department of psychology for his major, 
and made a very fine record as a student. It may be 
said that if he had spent these years in the pursuit of 
something in which he had had an interest from the 
beginning, he would have accomplished more, but I 
have his word that there is no subject which has for 
him greater fascination, and his record shows that 
his work in this line was as efficient as in any other. 

It is very important that we do not forget that we 
are apt to become deeply interested in the thing to 
which we attend. This is true of evil as well as good 
things, and is of prime significance in the field of 
morals. 

There has been a tendency of late toward a "soft" 
pedagogy. The cry is, "Find out what the child 
likes and let him have it " — " The child knows better 
what he wants and needs than do the parents and 



Interest and Attention 87 

teachers" — "Discover the child's appetite and then 
feed it." We seem to have forgotten that the very 
life of the child for the first years is conditioned by his 
inability to have everything for which he cries; that 
although the child knows best what he wants, he does 
not know his need so well as the wise parent — and 
it is a cheap and reckless thing to say that he does. 
Any one with mother wit knows it isn't so. And 
we forget that not only does the appetite determine 
what the food should be, but the food determines 
very largely what the appetite will be. 

The doctrine of spontaneity, of following out the 
natural interest of the pupil, should play an impor- 
tant role in all phases of education, but it should have 
most exclusive sway during the first seven or eight 
years of life. This is the time when weaknesses due 
to heredity are most apt to crop out as a result of 
overwork, under-nutrition, and misdirection. It is 
a time when voluntary attention is at a minimum, 
when the muscular and nervous systems are very un- 
stable. The life capital and conditions are such that 
it would seem a mistake to try to induce, and especially 
to force, interest through attention to what, at first, is 
comparatively uninteresting. 

Neurologists tell us that from about nine till about 



88 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

twelve the nervous system is comparatively stable and 
is much more exempt from hereditary diseases. We 
know also that the muscular system is capable of func- 
tioning pretty accurately; that the liability to fatigue, 
due to unproportionate development of the vascular 
and muscular systems, is not so great as heretofore; 
and that children are more free from disease and 
death at this time than they have ever been before or 
will ever be again, the girls reaching their minimum 
susceptibility at eleven and the boys at twelve. This 
is the best time in the life of the individual for drill 
work, for mastering the fundamentals, whether they 
are intrinsically interesting or not. As far as possible, 
work on these more or less uninteresting, but funda- 
mental things should be associated with things that 
are interesting. 

The observations of child life as now known seem to 
warrant the statement that until about eight years of 
age, — the time varies with individuals, — within the lim- 
its of right, the child's spontaneity should be unbridled 
and his natural interests gratified regardless of the 
amount of information he may get. This is no time 
to force attention, and the psychological truth that 
the teacher should keep uppermost in mind is that 
children attend to those things which have a natural 



Interest and Attention 89 

interest for them. On the other hand, while we should 
never ignore the dependence of interest upon attention, 
the constitution of the world is such that the child will 
have to attend to many things that are not intrinsically 
interesting, and the child from about nine to twelve 
is such that he can be trained into the habit of doing 
this with but little risk of damage. Our pedagogy 
will be less soft and much more effective if we bear in 
mind at this stage that the child is apt to become perma- 
nently interested in whatever he attends to. The three 
or four years preceding pubescence should be pre- 
eminently years of hard work, drill, repetition, and, 
if need be, drudgery, but let the work be as interesting 
as is consistent with these things. 



CHAPTER X 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RECITATION 

Every phase of school work should contribute 
its share to the sum total of training and scholarship 
which the child is to derive from the school. In this 
sense one phase of work is just as important as any 
other. Among a number of things, all of which are 
necessary to a complete process and a desired result, 
it is not easy to say that such and such are of first 
importance, and others of secondary importance. 
Nevertheless, certain stages in a process are often 
pivotal. All that have gone before are of value only 
as they lead up to these stages, and the result sought 
is the direct and often the immediate outgrowth of 
them. 

In all the varied and complex work of the school, 
the recitation is the pivot, or hinge; it is the center of 
the educational process. It is the educational arena. 
In the recitation the battle is lost or won. Success 
here almost invariably means a good school. Failure 
here means failure all along the line. A good recita- 

90 



The Significance of the Recitation 91 

tion is characterized by the birth of ideas, by con- 
secutive thought, by great tension between the pupil's 
mind and the subject under consideration. 

The teacher's purpose must not be merely to hear 
the children say over some things they may have 
gotten from books, but he must look upon the recita- 
tion as the chance of his life as a teacher, and as the 
chance of the child's life in its development. The 
lines must be drawn tight; the electric spark must 
fly, and the child's life must be quickened. All things 
must be conducive to this end. The excuse for a 
large part of school organization and school manage- 
ment is that they contribute to the recitation. The 
presuppositions of a good recitation are many and 
are important on their own account, but find their 
highest significance in serving as means rather than 
as ends in themselves. 

A teacher may be cranky on punctuality and regu- 
larity if he insists upon these things for their own sake, 
but when he sees their bearing upon life and upon 
the school process as a whole, he is working for the 
best good. Viewed from this standpoint, punctuality 
and regularity must be insisted upon. Anything short 
of attendance every day, at the hour set, must not be 
tolerated. This is absolutely essential for the strong, 



92 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

effective mental pull that characterizes the good recita- 
tion. As soon as the teacher diverts his attention, 
time, and energy from the students who are making 
this mental pull in order that he may serve as scaffold- 
ing or crutches for some student who has been tardy 
or absent, just so soon the recitation loses in effec- 
tiveness; and the damage that comes to the other 
members of the class — of which they and the teacher 
are often unaware — can hardly be estimated. In- 
sistence upon punctuality and regularity is justified 
upon many grounds, chief among them being that 
failure in either makes for havoc in the recitation and 
so defeats the purpose of the school. 

The teacher who is thus conscious of the relative 
significance of the recitation will endeavor to plan his 
work to make the most of this opportunity. He will 
see that it is imperative to make all assignments for 
study perfectly clear and definite, and of such a nature 
that the weakest in the class can accomplish definite 
results, that the strongest can employ beneficially all 
the time at their disposal, and that all are not only 
requested but required to prepare the work assigned. 
Such preparation on the part of the class, together 
with reasonable daily preparation by the teacher and 
fair skill in questioning and leadership, will result 



The Significance of the Recitation 93 

invariably in good recitations. But such preparation 
by the class means that the time set aside for this 
work has been profitably employed, which carries 
with it axiomatically the other important fact that the 
children have not been idling their time away or wast- 
ing it in pursuit of mischief. 

This is the kernel of School Management, a thing 
never to be considered as an end in itself. It is a mis- 
taken notion that the teacher manages the school and 
so brings about the conditions necessary for good work. 
Not so at all. School management and school teach- 
ing are dialectical. They go hand in hand. They 
dovetail into each other. We manage the school 
while we teach and through our teaching; and at the 
same time teaching is effective in proportion as the 
school is wisely organized and judiciously managed. 
There is no one thing the teacher can do that will 
make for order, industry, and system in the school so 
much as an insistence upon definite, careful, and com- 
plete preparation of the work assigned for recitation. 
The good recitation is the one thing to which, if it 
is sought and attained, all these other things shall 
be added. 

Unified attention on the part of the pupil and the 
class is a prime essential of the recitation. The dis- 



94 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

tracting stimuli must be reduced to a minimum. All 
materials which do not have a bearing upon the work 
in hand should be put away. The child is not apt 
to hold to a development for any length of time if a 
dozen things of more intrinsic interest are appealing 
to him. The teacher is infinitely more at fault than 
the child when he demands attention and fails to se- 
cure it, if the material conditions, at least, are not all 
favorable to such attention. As well give it up in the 
start as in the finish, if the child does not have a desk 
that fits him — if it is too high or too low or improperly 
shaped; if he has candy or fruit or irrelevant pictures 
and books on his desk ; if there is unnecessary noise or 
moving about the room; if the teacher is loud and 
boisterous or dramatic, and so detracts attention from 
the work to himself. This is the unpardonable sin in 
school teaching. Happily it is not the most universal 
one. 

In this endeavor to make all things focus in the 
good recitation, the superintendent or principal finds 
a large share of his mission. A student who is a few 
minutes tardy seeks an excuse from the principal which 
will entitle him to join his class. Here is a golden op- 
portunity for the principal to bring home to the pupil 
the importance of promptness in all things, while at 



The Significance of the Recitation 95 

the same time it gives him a chance to reenforce and 
encourage the teacher. But what will be done in this 
case? No one knows. In a large majority of such 
cases simple justice to all concerned, as well as the 
highest pedagogical consideration, demands that the 
pupil be not admitted to his class until the close of 
that recitation, and that unaided he be held respon- 
sible for the work he has missed. The class and the 
teacher are thus protected and the child has had one 
of the most important lessons of life impressed upon 
him. 

Nothing must be done or tolerated by the principal 
which will in the least interfere with the strong mental 
pull which the class is making under the stimulus 
and guidance of the teacher. Many principals are 
too apt to carry things with a high hand, to exercise 
the right of interference anywhere at any time. This 
is always a violation of the highest interest of the 
school. A principal, when he could just as well wait 
till the close of the recitation, steps in to consult the 
teacher, breaks the continuity of thought, sends the 
children in a dozen different ways, and unwittingly 
undermines the whole teaching process; or he mixes 
a shallow sense of courtesy with a shallow sense of 
pedagogy, and thinks that in showing visitors into 



96 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the different classes he must introduce them to the 
teachers. Such things are always fatal and show that 
the principal has not grasped the significance of the 
recitation. Nothing must interfere with it. It is the 
outcome, the fruitage of all things else. It is second- 
ary to nothing. For it all other things must wait. 
The inviolable rule which the principal must observe 
himself and insist upon others observing is that the 
continuity of the recitation must never be violated 
except in the most extreme cases, such as convulsions, 
fire, or earthquakes. Let the principal consult his 
teachers at teachers' meetings, at the beginning or 
close of sessions, between recitations or at vacant 
periods for the teacher, and let it be a settled con- 
viction with him that only in the most extreme cases 
will he do so while the recitation is in progress. Vis- 
itors should always be welcome, but let them enter the 
room at the beginning of the recitation or wait till 
its close, or, if time will not permit this, let them step 
in during the recitation and quietly observe the work 
without further ceremony. 

The good teacher will see that in the recitation 
there must be no side-tracking, there must be nothing 
irrelevant to the subject. All illustrations must re- 
enforce the work in hand. Nothing extraneous must 



The Significance of the Recitation 97 

be admitted on its own account. I have in mind now 
a teacher of algebra who would at the beginning 
of the recitation, with the avowed purpose of arous- 
ing interest, tell the class about something she had 
seen in her summer trip abroad. She declared that 
she never failed to arouse intense interest. Doubtless 
she never failed, but she aroused interest in what? 
Surely not in algebra. The longer and better the 
story, the farther she led her class away from algebra 
and the greater the difficulty in reclaiming them and 
getting them back to the subject. The teacher must 
be interested in the thing she teaches and able to 
interest her pupils in it, else she is a failure. The 
teacher's manner, her attitude toward her pupils and 
her work, her questions and answers, must all be con- 
ducive to consecutive, productive mental work on the 
part of the class. 

This kind of recitation work, together with the 
multitude of things which it presupposes, will have 
the most far-reaching and desirable results. It is 
recognized everywhere that much of the information 
gotten in the schools can in after years be turned to 
little practical use, and that the chief benefits derived 
from the school are mental discipline, habits of work, 
wholesome and intelligent attitudes toward people and 



98 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

affairs, and an ability to evaluate. The good recita- 
tion with its necessary presuppositions cannot fail to 
result in just these things. For a number of years 
the child has had definite work assigned commensu- 
rate to his attainments and has been required to take 
hold of it in a definite, methodical manner, and has 
gotten definite results, not only in the subject under 
consideration, but more especially in himself. Here, 
as nowhere else, is the teacher's opportunity to in- 
culcate the habits of industry, concentration, accu- 
racy, completeness, punctuality, and regularity which 
count for so much in the child's after years, for hap- 
piness and success, and his efficiency and desirability 
as a social factor. 

The recitation, if correctly viewed as the center of 
the school, and successfully managed as such, must re- 
sult in a high degree of capability and trustworthiness 
in the child, which is the crowning glory of all edu- 
cational work. 



CHAPTER XI 

ON RELATING WORK 

Certain questions on which teachers are at vari- 
ance are: To what extent should the reason be given? 
Should we speculate and philosophize much or little? 
Or, should we give the child the thing practically 
cold and naked and let him make out of it what he 
can? 

One teacher with a class of children will try to ex- 
plain the reason for writing down the right-hand figure 
and carrying the other in a problem in addition, and 
is considered a thorough teacher; while another who 
teaches the children to write down the right-hand 
figure and carry the other, without a word of explana- 
tion as to the reason for so doing, is denounced as 
"slipshod." This "slipshod" teacher works with the 
thought that he is conferring upon his children skill 
in manipulating figures, accuracy in processes, and a 
knowledge of means to an end ; they will, he thinks, 
naturally and with little difficulty "see through it." 
And he denounces his reasoning pedagogical brethren 

99 
LOFC. 



ioo The Basis of Practical Teaching 

as hair-splitters — teachers of dialectics, perhaps, but 
not of mathematics. 

I know a man who consumed the greater portion 
of a recitation period trying to explain the reason for 
the nose being located as it is. It was shown why 
this place or that would not be a good one. A half- 
dozen different parts of the body were considered. 
For example, many reasons were produced why it 
would have been a mistake to have placed the nose 
between the shoulders; and many reasons were 
brought out why the nose should be in close proximity 
to the mouth, and many other reasons why it should 
be above rather than below the mouth. Well, that 
was interesting to me. The children were interested, 
and were skirmishing about to find out why. The 
order was good, the children were responsive. When 
they said this or that, it was true. The work was 
more or less logical, and no mistakes were made in 
it, except the great mistake — the mistake of doing 
such work at all. But the matter-of-fact teacher 
errs in the opposite extreme. He says, every child 
knows where the nose is, and, furthermore, he knows 
that to remove it to any other part of the body would 
be a violent stroke at beauty and utility, and in abso- 
lute scorn of this "reasoning out" work, passes the 



On Relating Work 101 

subject by without even hinting at the mutual re- 
enforcement of the senses of smell and taste. 

A certain institute instructor gave a whole day to 
the discussion of the best method of presenting to 
the child the number two in all of its relations. She 
was an earnest and more or less helpful instructor, 
anxious to do what would be best, and she said to a 
fellow-teacher, "What do you think of the work I did 
to-day?" What he answered was in substance this: 
"Perhaps everything you said was true, in fact I think 
it was, but it was useless. I should think that a child 
who had to be taught that way had as well never go 
to school. Any sane child six years old knows those 
things about the number two before he enters school." 

In these cases, is one person right and the other 
wrong? Are both right or both wrong? May I 
suggest what would be a good thing for teachers to 
do? Take up each one of these cases and try to 
decide for yourselves wherein each person was wise 
and wherein unwise. It is one of the best things 
you can do, even if you do not get the answer. To 
take up fact after fact in an isolated, unrelated way 
in any line of investigation is surely not good peda- 
gogy; and to try to reduce everything to its primal 
cause and speculate as to its ultimate outcome is 



102 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

surely in most cases impossible — if not really un- 
wise if it were possible. To know how far back to 
go in the study of events introductory to the American 
Revolution is not easy. It would seem that some 
steps preliminary to Lexington and Concord should 
be noted. But it would seem extravagant to require 
a preparation on the Roman State, Laws, and Con- 
stitution; yet for the special advanced student this 
might be a reasonable requirement. 

Through the remainder of this chapter we shall 
follow out one line of thought illustrating the point 
which has in a general way been hinted at — the 
interdependence of things, the reason of one fact in 
another. We shall show this by looking at history 
in its relation to geography. And if what is said in 
this one line is helpful, let the teachers transfer the 
general thought to other lines and adapt it as they 
may be able to do so, remembering that, after all 
has been said, it will be of help only by way of sug- 
gestion and warning. Who needs more than this 
will be helped but little. 

A student asked his teacher : " Why were the 
Phoenicians a sea-faring people and the Egyptians a 
sea-fearing people? Both were near the sea. They 
had practically the same kind of climate and were 



On Relating Work 103 

more or less akin." The teacher said, "Well, there 
are some things — in fact, a great many things — that 
can't be explained; the fact is that the Phoenicians 
were a sea-faring and the Egyptians a sea-fearing 
people, and that's all there is about it." Doubtless 
that was "all there was about it" as far as that teacher 
was concerned, but that boy didn't think so, and he 
left the recitation dissatisfied if not thoroughly dis- 
gusted. Think of requiring a student to accept such 
skeletons as history ! 

If the teacher had applied a limited amount of 
geographical knowledge and just a little more his- 
torical knowledge, he could have shown that the 
Phoenicians lived in a narrow country between the 
sea on the west and the mountains on the east, beyond 
which were strong barbaric and semi- barbaric peo- 
ples who were continually pushing over the moun- 
tains and crowding down upon the people below 
and driving them out; that the country itself was 
small and with difficulty could support an ever in- 
creasing population. The Phoenicians could take their 
choice and go over the mountains and against the 
peoples to the east of them, or they could go against 
the sea to the west of them. For the most part 
they chose the latter alternative, and thus through 



104 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the force of necessity they came to be a sea-faring 
nation. 

On the other hand, the Egyptians lived in a broad 
and fertile country. With a reasonable amount of 
effort they could live at home. Behind them there 
was no such powerful and aggressive nation as there 
was behind the Phoenicians. The reasons that sent 
the Phoenicians to sea were not present with the 
Egyptians with so much force. And, on the other 
hand, for the Egyptians to take to the sea meant now 
competition not only with the sea, but also with the 
Phoenicians. They took their choice, and stayed at 
home. Through the force of circumstances the Egyp- 
tians thus came to be a sea-fearing people. With 
proper direction the class could have worked this 
out better than I have given it (I have seen it done 
more than once) ; they would have gained something, 
and would have been satisfied with it. 

The average student will find a perfunctory study 
of Grecian history from the text a monotonous thing. 
But if the teacher will make the story real and reason- 
able, it will not be monotonous. Why was Greece, 
with an area less than half that of the state of 
Indiana, divided into twenty-four states? The stu- 
dent reads in his geography that Indiana is the smallest 



On Relating Work 105 

of the North Central states, and now he finds a coun- 
try only half as large as this state organized into 
twenty-four states. It strikes him as a strange thing. 
A little geographical work will make the mystery 
clear. When his attention is directed to the map 
and a contour and relief description of this little coun- 
try is given him; when he sees that the country is cut 
to pieces by mountains running in every direction, by 
inlets, gulfs, and bays, that each little section is more 
or less isolated, and that communication from one to 
another is carried on with somewhat of difficulty, he 
will see some reason for local government, and the 
organization of many separate states. Then the 
jealousies and strifes which would naturally follow 
such a condition of affairs will open up the way to an 
understanding of the many domestic wars. The his- 
tory of Greece simply cannot be gotten without its 
geographical setting, and this characteristic it has 
in common with every other country. 

The influence of geography upon the historical in- 
stitutions can be shown in no more effective way than 
by a comparison of these institutions in the three 
geographical zones. It is poor history and poor 
geography to teach the child simply that institutional 
life is found in higher and more fully developed forms 



106 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

in the temperate than in the torrid and frigid zones. 
There must be some reason for this, and any child 
who is ready for the fact at all can easily comprehend 
the reason. He knows this — that children are lazy 
in warm weather; and he also knows that as a rule 
they don't work unless they have to. (He may know 
that this isn't limited to children.) He knows that the 
climate in the torrid zone is very warm, and he knows 
that in many parts of this zone there is excessive rain- 
fall, and that a great variety of food stuff grows in 
great abundance. On the one hand, the people will 
be apt to be somewhat lazy, sluggish, and ignorant; 
on the other hand, they will be compelled to energize 
but little, for food is prepared by nature, and of cloth- 
ing and shelter they need little. All the conditions 
necessary for the development of strong institutions 
are wanting, and we find just what would naturally be 
expected. 

Then, what about the frigid zone ? The child knows 
many things which will help him in working out the 
explanation. He knows that in winter the range of 
productive activities is limited; that plants do not 
grow as in the summer and that fishing is next to im- 
possible. He furthermore knows that income is one of 
the strongest incentives to work. When he learns that 



On Relating Work 107 

the frigid zone has practically a long and continuous 
winter with a very narrow and circumscribed range of 
possible activities; that, however much or little one 
may energize, one gets just about so much out of it, 
the mystery of low institutional forms and life will no 
longer exist for him. In the temperate zone he finds 
a variety of climate, a variety of soils, and every con- 
dition present to encourage industry, thought, and 
enterprise. Food, clothing, shelter, and the luxuries 
of life cannot be had for the mere asking as in the 
torrid zone. Neither does one ask and strive in vain 
for these as in the frigid zone. The peculiar natural 
condition in the temperate zone is that every one must 
work for what he gets and that he gets what he works 
for. He has to work, but he is paid for it. Work is 
the developer and pay is the incentive; this is shown 
in the advancement made in every form of institutional 
life. 

Let us consider another illustration in the same line. 
Take the institution of slavery in the United States and 
its result — the Civil War. The history I studied in 
the common schools gave no hint that there was any 
geographical reason for this institution's existing as it 
did and where it did. It is not to my credit, but it is 
true, that not until after I had served a term as a 



108 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

teacher did I know that slaves were ever held in the 
New England states, and then it was much longer be- 
fore I knew the reason why the institution did not 
prosper there as in the South. I simply divided the 
country into two parts — in one lived the good people 
who had no slaves, and in the other lived the 
mean people who owned slaves. And finally they 
became so very mean that the good people had to 
punish them and set the slaves free. But why should 
all the good people happen to live in one place and all 
the mean ones in another? That question did not 
present itself. If my attention had been called to the 
geography of the situation and the teacher had given 
some skillful direction in relating it to my history 
work, I could have gotten from it something of real 
historical value as well as geographical value. As it 
was, I got next to nothing, and that was wrong. Some 
one has said, "It is better to know a little less than to 
know so much that isn't right." I have since known 
children to work it out in this way : The New England 
states are rugged and mountainous. The climate is 
cold. Extensive agriculture is impossible, especially 
the plantation system; tobacco, rice, and cotton, the 
products of the plantation, will not grow here. But 
in these states building material for the construction 



On Relating Work 109 

of manufactories is plentiful. The rivers are short and 
rapid and capable of running immense machinery. 
Owing to the natural conditions, manufacturing be- 
came the chief industry of this section. But manu- 
facturing means handling machinery; this means 
skilled labor. This was death to slavery, for slave 
labor was unskilled, and only with great expense 
could it be made otherwise. On the other hand, 
the conditions in the South for plantation life were 
excellent — tobacco, rice, and cotton could be culti- 
vated with great profit to the planter. The chief need 
was rice, cotton, and tobacco pickers and " clod-hop- 
pers." This work demands no skill; muscle and en- 
durance are the chief requirements. These the slave 
had. Slavery was a paying institution, and it was 
fostered; and the geographical conditions were the 
chief factors that determined that here it should be a 
paying institution, while in the New England states it 
could not possibly be profitable. 

History and geography are thus mutually inter- 
dependent from beginning to finish. Almost every 
boundary of every modern state given in our school 
geographies has an historical significance, to say noth- 
ing of names and locations of cities, and numberless 
other details. History is bare, meaningless, and bur- 



no The Basis of Practical Teaching 

densome without its geographical setting. Any good 
teacher knows enough of both of these branches to do 
work of this kind, if he would be careful to work out 
the relations. The relationship between history and 
geography may be somewhat more obvious than that 
between other lines of work, but it is not more real. 
The teacher should be careful to give proper em- 
phasis to such relationships. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE STIMULUS OF SUCCESS 

One of the problems that is ripe for the student of 
psychology and of great importance to teachers is the 
Psychology of Success with pedagogical and social ap- 
plications. No one at present has given this subject 
the attention and careful study which it merits, and 
yet on the surface there is hardly a question in the 
field of psychology, pedagogy, or sociology that prom- 
ises more. In general we believe that what anything 
can do or become depends more or less upon what it 
has been doing, and so we believe that one's ability to 
accomplish certain tasks depends somewhat upon 
the ability he has gained in performing this or similar 
tasks. We predict a man's future by his past, both 
in general and in particular. After all else is said, one 
of the great differences among men is a difference in 
ability to do things — to make things come to pass. 
And it is true here that, other things being equal, we 
judge of a man's outlook in the light of his retrospect. 
It is not only true that "nothing succeeds like success," 

in 



H2 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

but it is also true that nothing helps one to succeed so 
much as a success already won. We shall have taken 
a long step in advance, psychologically and ethically, 
when we see that not what a man needs to do, but 
rather what he feels from former experience he can 
do, is the thing he will accomplish. Not necessity, 
but faith in his ability, is what sets a man to his task 
and keeps him at it. 

In the absence of strictly scientific data our dis- 
cussion must be based upon common observation, but 
it is hoped that the applications to be made will not 
suffer greatly for this reason. Every teacher has 
noticed with what enthusiasm and vigor children take 
up difficult tasks in arithmetic after they have been 
successful in the solution of some very difficult, knotty 
problem. Not all the coaxing, or scolding, or moraliz- 
ing in the world would fit them half so well to take up 
the new work, as the victory already won. Whoever 
has attended country spelling matches, which were so 
widely in vogue until recent years, knows what effect 
for future contests a single victory had upon the cham- 
pion and the entire school of which he was a member. 
A study of college oratory and the development of col- 
lege orators would bring out some very valuable data. 
The professor of oratory often finds it difficult to keep 



The Stimulus of Success 113 

the squad of orators from becoming "dead," so to 
speak, before the primary, and progress seems to be 
very slow. But after the primary it is often surpris- 
ing to note the remarkable development of the suc- 
cessful candidate. No doubt the psychology of the 
expert, 1 as worked out by President W. L. Bryan and 
Superintendent Noble Harter, would play an impor- 
tant role here; but inasmuch as the lift-up usually 
comes directly after the first success, it would seem 
that the success is an important factor; and so the 
college that has been winning continues to win. Not 
the wish to win, so much as the belief that victory 
is certain, does the work. The former, without the 
latter in good measure, rather inhibits than reenforces. 
Any one who is acquainted with high school or college 
athletics knows how important success at the begin- 
ning is, and how depressing is a series of failures. 
The social effect in all of these things is a very large 
factor. The former champion takes up his new task 
with greater confidence in himself, and he inspires his 
followers with confidence; while on the other hand, 
his opponents view him as a more formidable adver- 
sary, and in comparing themselves with their task are 
not so large or so sure as they were before the success 

1 Psychological Review, July, 1899. 



1 14 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

of their rival. His success has enlarged him and his 
followers, and reduced the opponents. 

The same effect is seen both psychologically and 
sociologically in the case of success in business. Not 
only does the business man who has achieved success 
take up new enterprises with more vigor and a higher 
degree of assurance, but the entire community be- 
lieves in him, and so he is doubly reenforced for the 
undertaking. 

But the great help that success already won gives to 
an individual is shown nowhere to better advantage 
than in the field of morals or will training — in the 
formation of new habits of life, and in breaking away 
from old ones. Many young people are kept from 
doing wrong things and falling into evil ways simply 
because they have never done so. One young man 
says: "I do not keep from the saloon so much from a 
mere sense of right and wrong. I do other things 
that are equally bad, but I have lived thirty years 
without darkening the door of a saloon, and that keeps 
me out. If I were to break down the possibility of 
saying that, I think I should become a regular visitor 
at such places." The thirty years behind him, not 
the moral ground he has attained, is the restrain- 
ing power. And it should be noted here that the 



The Stimulus of Success 



"5 



reason a man takes the second drink more easily is 
not, so much as is commonly supposed, that he 
has gotten a taste and, having it in his blood, 
cannot get away from it. In a way this is true, 
and should in itself be sufficient reason to keep one 
from taking the wrong step. But the chief reason is 
this: Before this step was taken, he was an abstainer; 
now he is a participant, and as such it is infinitely 
easier to do such things, even if he bears the same 
name, lives at the same place, is known by all as the 
same man, and has only twenty-four hours between 
himself and his former self. So it goes in the forma- 
tion of all our bad habits; the redeeming feature of 
the thing is that the rule works equally well in the 
formation of good ones. If the man who is addicted 
to drink or tobacco could live under conditions which 
free him from temptation, and which at the same 
time make it very difficult for him to secure them 
when his appetite or system demands them; and if 
he would thus abstain for some months, he would 
have one of the strongest braces possible for continued 
abstinence. It must not be denied, however, that his 
peculiarly good situation has enabled him to wean 
himself from these things and set his system to rights 
again. I would not ignore this point in the least, but 



1 1 6 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

wish to bring out at its full value the important part 
that success plays. One man who used tobacco until 
he was more than fifty and then quit, says: "I often 
want it just as much as I ever did, but I haven't tasted 
it for five years and I don't intend to do so." One of 
the great things in his favor is the fact that he has 
succeeded for five years. 

Success seems to enlarge in every way the man who 
has attained it; not only does he instantly feel re- 
lieved and free from the old task, but he feels invig- 
orated and ready for a new battle; he thrills through 
and through, his eye flashes, he straightens himself 
up, and for the time being actually grows taller. The 
effect that success has upon one physiologically is as 
full of interest and value as its effect psychologically. 
The heart beat is affected, circulation is changed, the 
function of nutrition and the work of the glands, se- 
cretory and excretory, are accelerated or retarded. It 
would be strange indeed if the physiological effect of 
success were not almost, if not quite, as marked as are 
the physiological effects of fear, as shown by Mosso 1 ; 
but the facts need to be studied more fully. Does 
not this enlargement of the self as felt by the success- 

1 See Mosso's " Fear," published by Longmans, Green and Company, 
New York. 



The Stimulus of Success 117 

ful man, and often unconsciously subscribed to by 
others, account for the tendency on the part of most 
people to regard the man of knowledge or of wealth 
as in some way superior? As we think the matter 
over, we are apt to say that the rich man is no better 
than the poor man, and should be esteemed no more 
highly (and in many cases this judgment is true) ; but 
in spite of ourselves, when we meet a man who has 
amassed a great fortune and is known the country 
over as a money king, we do not feel that ease and 
freedom which we have when in the company of our 
professional and financial equals. If not with our 
mouths, we do surely admit with our feelings that, in 
one respect at least, this man is our superior. 

In these various ways we see what the psychologic 
effect is upon the person who achieves success, and 
what the social effect is upon those about him. The 
principle applies all the way from the successful child 
in the primary school up to the great naval officer in 
his success at Manila. What should this mean for 
pedagogy? Two things, at least. In the first place, 
in the assignment of work, the teacher should be care- 
ful to keep within the limits of the child's ability. It 
is a great mistake to suppose that because the activity 
which one puts forth in the accomplishment of a task 



n8 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

is the chief gain to be derived, therefore it is of no con- 
sequence how difficult and impossible for the child 
the assignment is. If our children were all philoso- 
phers or students of psychical research, it would be 
of little consequence whether the assignment were 
possible of solution or not. But, happily, they are 
not. They are simply children, subject to the encour- 
agements and discouragements of common humanity, 
and in school they ought to be accorded the same 
fighting chance and stimulations that adults outside 
the school so much need, and without which they so 
often fail. And when the child does an unusually 
difficult piece of work, or improves upon himself in 
any way, it is simply his due that the teacher recognize 
the fact. Again, this is according the child no more 
than his elders out in the world need to keep them 
going. Nothing will keep children at their work for 
more hours than the fact that they have been doing 
well, and that this fact is recognized by the teacher. 

Many pages could be written upon the social effect of 
success, but they would not be strictly in place here. 
But this much may be said: No help will serve the 
person who is down so much as that which assists him 
to achieve a victory. We too often feed our tramps 
just enough to enable them to get to the next house or 



The Stimulus of Success 119 

town; we too often relieve the drunkard by giving 
him a dime. The problem that confronts the social 
student and the practical pedagogue right here — and 
it is no mean problem — is this : How can people who 
are unnecessarily or temporarily dependent be enabled 
to achieve a success in something that is worth while? 
But wherever we meet people, especially the young, 
let us not be too fearful lest we develop their vanity, 
and let us be a little more careful to let them know 
that we appreciate their good work. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE INDIVIDUAL IN INSTITUTIONS 

Students of modern philosophy are fond of show- 
ing that many of our fundamental human conceptions 
have their basis and origin in society; that as indi- 
viduals we never should have arrived at what are now, 
for each of us, some of our most useful and matter- 
of-course conceptions, had it not been that from birth 
we have been associating with our fellow-creatures. 
And such thinkers as Dr. Paul Cams find great pleas- 
ure in showing how even the individual, as such, has 
had a social origin. For pedagogical purposes it will 
not be necessary to enter upon such abstruse consider- 
ations. It will suffice here to show in what way much 
of the individual's present equipment is due to his 
social environment — to his life among people and in 
the so-called institutions. 

We can easily imagine a first family settling on the 
frontier. Indeed we know of first families who drove 
from Pennsylvania and Virginia through the wilderness 
to what was then the frontier in the Mississippi Valley. 



The Individual in Institutions 121 

Ofttimes a single family settled in a place remote 
from all civilized life and there began to work out 
its own temporal destiny. Such a family living all 
alone on the frontier was in every particular a law 
unto itself. There was no specialization or differen- 
tiation of labor, professions, or institutions. The 
father was, at least, the farmer, the carpenter, the 
blacksmith, the shoemaker, the school superintendent, 
the minister, the policeman, the judge, and the gov- 
ernor. The mother was the cook, the washwoman, the 
housecleaner, the doctor, the nurse, the teacher, and 
the governor's cabinet. The children at first were 
merely the recipients of these undifferentiated minis- 
trations. It can be seen at once that service in most, 
if not all these lines, was perforce very inefficient. In 
a certain sense this family was very independent, but 
in a truer sense its limitations were many and the 
horizon of its hopes not wide. The teaching of the 
children must have been neglected by the cook. The 
cooking of wholesome food stuffs for the family must 
have been neglected by the washwoman, the doctor- 
ing of the family could not have been done well by 
the housecleaner, and the housecleaning itself was 
slighted by the nurse. The same sort of difficulties 
confronted the father in the performance of his mani- 



122 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

fold duties, so that the school superintendent must 
slight the farm, and the farmer must slight the house 
building, and the carpenter must slight his police 
duties. 

This man and his wife were free to do all of these 
things — they were in no way subjected to the customs 
and laws of a surrounding community; yet they were 
the slaves of their own social isolation. They were 
not free to do anything as it should be done for them- 
selves or their children. Let it not be forgotten that 
one can never get far enough into the wilderness to 
escape the law that the price paid for being a Jack-of- 
all-trades is that you can be master of none. They 
were free to teach, but they were not free to teach well 
with an undivided mind and heart. 

By and by the community grew by the addition of 
other families, and life began to differentiate in a simple 
fashion. A certain building was erected or set apart 
for school purposes, and one of the best taught of the 
little community — a parent or an older child in some 
family — was called to "keep school" for a few months 
during the winter season. The schoolhouse also served 
as a place of public worship, and certain gifted indi- 
vidual members of the community became the religious 
leaders. Business also began to differentiate. The 



The Individual in Institutions 123 

community, although small, was large enough so that 
not all members needed to do exactly the same things. 
Those who wished to till the soil could devote most 
of the time to that, and those who wished to build 
houses and barns could devote most of the time to 
such work. Certain men with the instinct for trading 
would carry whatever surplus of goods might happen 
to be produced in the home neighborhood up and 
down the river, sometimes many miles away, to settle- 
ments which had a shortage of this particular thing, 
but a surplus of something else just as desirable ; and 
so the occupation of commerce set in. Following upon 
this there was need for a general storehouse where 
goods collected to be sent out could be kept in safety, 
and where imported goods could be distributed to 
those wishing to purchase; this was the excuse for 
the little general store always to be found in these 
early frontier settlements. One generation ago these 
stores were quite common in the Mississippi Valley, 
and to-day they are not uncommon in many of the 
newer Western states. 

Only a few years ago many of our leading colleges 
had a professor of history and literature, and a professor 
of mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Seldom do 
you find to-day such a combination of subjects for 



124 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

one man, and then only in third- and fourth-rate 
institutions. 

From the simple undifferentiated life of the pioneers 
we have passed to the complex, differentiated life of 
to-day along all lines. As a rule the minister is no 
longer a spiritual farmer with a good "common school 
education"; the teacher is no longer without scholas- 
tic and professional training. A half thousand men 
are required to make a piano, each doing his own par- 
ticular piece of work, and a score of men are required, 
in the same way, to make a shoe. 

We no longer have a professor of history and litera- 
ture, but we have professors of history, each especially 
equipped in special phases of the subject, and pro- 
fessors of literature, each with like special equipment 
for his work. And so it is in all our professional and 
business life. Practically all of the goods of the United 
States are retailed in department stores, in grocery 
stores, shoe stores, men's furnishing stores, hardware 
stores, and the like. 

We have come to the place where, like St. Paul, we 
say, each of us, "This one thing I do." Our pioneer 
forefathers said these many things we do, but we say 
this one thing. In this movement from the many lines 
of daily interest to the one main line, there has been a 



The Individual in Institutions 125 

gradual surrender. I am not able to make my shoes 
and mend my watch as was my pioneer forefather, 
neither do I know in which phase of the moon to sow 
my cabbage seed and roof my house. But the ele- 
ment of gain is greater than the element of loss. The 
compensation for this wholesale surrender has been 
immense. I eat better cabbage than my ancestor who 
sowed his cabbage seed the same day he taught school 
and made his shoes. I live in a better house than he 
did; my minister knows more and preaches better 
sermons than did his, and my children are taught by 
better teachers. And all this has come about because, 
not only I, but practically all other men have said, 
"This one thing I do." 

To-day practically every line of activity is carried 
on by laborers more or less skilled in the things they 
do. Formerly these things were done by men living 
under circumstances which made skill in many lines a 
practical impossibility. 

The outcome of all this is that the world's work was 
never so well done as it is now, and that the world's 
service to the individual was never so great as at the 
present day. And there never has been a time in 
this country when each individual was so dependent 
upon those about him for so many of the necessities 



126 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

and luxuries of life as to-day. Because I do but one 
thing, I am dependent upon my fellows for all things 
else. This in a very brief way hints at the complexity 
of our modern social life and the mutual dependence 
of people upon one another. 

What is the educational significance of all this? 
Many men see in this movement a large social excuse 
for early specialization in school work. The children 
are, they say, destined to do certain particular things, 
and they must acquire great skill in these things. 
Let them, therefore, begin early to develop such skill, 
and let the public schools offer ample opportunity for 
such development — and so the various professions 
and industrial trades are knocking hard on the doors 
of our public schools for admission. 

It is admitted on every hand that from the stand- 
point of the symmetrical development of the child 
they are wrong, but the advocates of early speciali- 
zation stand unmovable on the basis of the com- 
plexity and diversity of our modern life. The society 
in which the child lives, they insist, is such as to make 
early special preparation imperative. 

Our social life does indeed speak a loud and im- 
portant word upon this subject, but I do not believe 
that it is the word which many people think they 



The Individual in Institutions 127 

hear. The imperative demand seems to be that 
the schools shall offer a broad basis of general culture 
for every child in the land. When every one worked 
at almost everything ; when there were few or no experts ; 
when skill in all kinds of labor was at a minimum, a 
person could do one thing about as well as another, 
and it made little difference which of many things he 
turned his attention to. Displacement from any par- 
ticular line of work was of no consequence, for his lack 
of skill in some other work was no greater than else- 
where, and he moved along with his old-time ease and 
success. If he couldn't plow, he could ditch; if he 
couldn't ditch, he could help in the building of cabins; 
if he found no employment here, he could roll logs 
or do any of a score of other things equally well. 

Not so to-day; every displacement at the present 
time is accompanied by considerable inconvenience 
of readjustment, and often great suffering. Through 
loss of an eye or limb, through deafness, through the 
invention of machinery, thousands of people are annu- 
ally displaced from pursuits which they have narrowly 
prepared themselves to pursue; and they find it im- 
possible to transfer themselves to other fields already 
preempted by specialists and experts, without greatly 
reducing their standards and thus entailing great 
hardships. 



128 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

Our social life is complex; it is fearfully diversified; 
it demands skill and expertness, but this skill must be 
grafted upon a broad basis of general culture, if society 
is ever to free itself from the displaced thousands who 
are obliged, because of early and continuous narrow 
training, to do just one thing or nothing. Happy the 
person who, finding that through some physical mis- 
hap or some social transformation there is no more 
demand for the thing he has been doing, has had the 
opportunity in youth and young manhood to develop 
himself, and to lay up stores of information in many 
fields of knowledge. New skills will indeed have to 
be attained, but with this broad basis of culture the 
time required will be comparatively short, the diffi- 
culty greatly reduced, and the inconvenience of such 
transfer comparatively small. Just because our life 
is narrow and intense is the greatest social reason why 
no one should be satisfied with narrow, superficial 
preparation. Not only does theoretical pedagogy 
demand sound, extensive, general education for the 
masses, but sociology as well is crying aloud for the 
extension of the opportunities of basal training to every 
child in the land, of however humble birth and in how- 
ever circumscribed field he seems destined to pass his 
life. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE TRAINING OF YOUNG CHILDREN 

The development of the child from the second up 
to the seventh or eighth year, while not precisely the 
same during any succession of months or years, is 
marked by no decided turns. The annual increase 
in height and weight does not vary greatly, but there 
is a steady growth in both these directions, very much 
less rapid than in the first year, and less rapid than 
during the years that immediately follow this stage. 
The child is becoming more and more active, but 
owing to a lack of development of the peripheral 
muscles and the nerves that control them, his move- 
ments are uncoordinated, so that he is not effective 
as a producer and activity is its own excuse for being. 

Special sense education and the development of 
language continue at a rapid rate; the brain grows 
rapidly and approximates its full weight at the age of 
seven or eight. The sensory side is still in advance 
of the motor, but the child is by no means receptive 

129 



130 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

only. His activity, resulting in no outer product of 
value, finds its immediate value in itself, and so this 
is the stage of play. His keen sensory side catches up 
every suggestion, making this preeminently the stage 
of suggestion and imitation. He gets most of his in- 
formation first hand through the senses; further than 
this his mental life is made up chiefly of reproduced 
images and crude products of the imagination, al- 
though he is capable of carrying on, in a simple 
fashion, many of the higher mental processes. 

Unless spoiled, the child at this age knows no such 
thing as shame or modesty; he is apt to be selfish and 
fond of teasing and bullying, as has been so well shown 
by Burk. 1 His notions of right and wrong are not 
clearly defined and are very vacillating. Any vestige 
of a moral code that he may possess is not of his own 
making but has been impressed upon him from with- 
out through suggestion rather than precept. 

As in infancy growth is the prime desideratum, so 
here it is the thing of chief importance; not so much 
a quiet unfolding of the latent powers of the child as 
in infancy, but rather a development through activity. 
But it must not be forgotten that the benefit derived 

1 Frederick Burk, " Teasing and Bullying." Pedagogical Seminary, 
April, 1897. 



The Training of Young Children 131 

here from the activity of the child is to be found in 
the child and not in the thing which he does. 

"During the period of brain growth in bulk up to 
the seventh year, when the full size and weight are 
almost attained, nutritive influences are of the largest 
value. How far this can reach positively needs future 
demonstration, but is rich in promise; how far nega- 
tively, is well understood, but receives as yet insufficient 
support. There are during these early days more 
formative power and less output of energy exhibited." 1 

All of the essentials for normal growth in the stage 
of infancy should be diligently observed here as well 
— nutrition, cleanliness, sunshine, fresh air, and care 
to prevent arrested development from diseases and 
traumatisms. But in addition to these things, there 
arises here the pedagogic problem of positive training, 
physical and mental. 

The first question, of course, is this: Should the 
child receive any systematic training during this stage, 
or should we simply observe the foregoing conditions 
for growth and keep hands off? 

This much can be said in regard to this question. 
Biology and psychology tell us that what one can do at 

1 J. Madison Taylor, " The Causes of Mental Impairment in Chil- 
dren." A. M.S. Bulletin, July 15, 1895. 



132 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

any given time depends more or less upon what he has 
been doing; i.e. the life of one stage is determined 
very largely by the life preceding this stage. From 
about two up to seven or eight the child is acting and 
reacting. He is giving himself his first kinks and 
turns. He is laying out the lines for his future autom- 
atisms and driving the stakes. His style of sitting, 
walking, speaking, and throwing, his style of reaction 
to authority, his style of social reaction, are all becom- 
ing defined and taking set during these plastic years. 
The lines are being laid for or against the child whether 
he will or not. Care and systematic training should 
be given during this stage only in such measure as will 
assure the best approach in all of these lines to the 
years that are to follow. For such guidance the essen- 
tials are sensible sympathy and a rare fund of insight 
and self-control. 

Where we do not know the wise course in training, 
the watchword should be "hands off." But the 
most commonplace teacher or parent knows that if 
a child sits "humped up" the first years of his life, 
the chances are that he will never sit erect ; if he is 
allowed to fly into a fury and scream and tear his hair 
during these years, the tendency later will be to do 
something worse; if he does everything in a slouchy, 



The Training of Young Children 133 

careless, half-finished way, with great difficulty will 
he ever learn to do things in any other way. If he is 
allowed to lie and steal with impunity, he will develop 
into a thoroughgoing liar and thief. With respect 
to these and similar things the child should not be 
allowed to develop at random. Who knows more, 
can do more; who knows less, should most assuredly 
do less. In a word then, our motto for this stage 
should not be "hands off," but rather this: a better 
knowledge of child life, and greater sympathy with it, 
so that we may be able to know how and when to lay 
hands on. 

Let us notice a second question: If the child is to 
receive more or less systematic training at this time, 
what should it be ? 

It has already been observed that during this stage 
the child's keen sensory side catches up every sugges- 
tion, so that this is the stage of suggestion and imita- 
tion. Here is one of the keys to the solution of the 
problem. Another key is to be found in the fact that 
this is preeminently the play stage. We have here a 
hint at both matter and method. (1) The greater 
part of the child's activity, and, indeed, all of it at the 
beginning of this stage, should be play and not work. 
(2) Work should be only introduced gradually in 



134 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

proportion as the child develops in mental and physical 
control. (3) The child should not be required to 
perform a perfect piece of objective work. 

In regard to method, but two things can be said with 
any degree of definiteness. (1) Suggestion should 
play an important role, and (2) the spontaneity of 
the child should have full freedom. 

This gives us a basis for the discussion of these two 
practical questions: (a) What things may be taught 
the child at this time? (b) How should they be 
taught ? 

It would require many volumes to discuss the merits 
and demerits of the entire catalogue of subjects, so 
the purpose here will be merely to touch upon enough 
things to bring out the thought and illustrate the prin- 
ciple. Let us make the application to the child's 
play, work, and conduct. 

Play. If play is to serve its highest end, it must be 
spontaneous for the most part, free from outer direc- 
tion, and careless of ends. Play under close super- 
vision is a self-contradiction — it not only defeats the 
ends of play, but ceases to be play. Parents and 
teachers need to remember that to require children 
to play according to prescribed formulae means to 
have them quit play and go to work, and at the same 



The Training of Young Children 135 

time robs them of all the benefit of the initiative ; and 
that thereby the main avenue of approach to the 
child's life is closed. It is a matter of common obser- 
vation that to know a child, or any one else for that 
matter, we must leave him free to live his own life. 
This free living of the child is his play. It is com- 
mendable in parents to join in the plays with their 
children, but if they do so, they must do it for the 
most part at the suggestion of the child, and play the 
part the child would have them play in his own way. 

Kindergartners and teachers in elementary schools 
would do well to observe the same thing. To call 
work play doesn't make it play, and any performance 
planned and closely supervised by the teacher, how- 
ever attractive it may be in itself, realizes less in play 
results than in work results. This suggests the amount 
of freedom and spontaneity that should characterize 
the school plays of this early stage, whether within 
or without the schoolroom. If the kindergarten em- 
phasizes play as an element in its curriculum, it must 
not be tardy in recognizing what are the essential 
elements of play. Furthermore, we should remem- 
ber that, as Sheldon and Gulick have shown, during 
these years children do not take kindly to organized 
play or so-called teamwork, and when inveigled into 



136 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

it, are unsuccessful. It must not be forgotten that 
during these years the accessory muscles are not under 
good control, that movements are uncoordinated, 
that the child is not effective as a producer, and that 
activity finds its immediate value in itself. Coopera- 
tion is essentially a work factor and not a play factor; 
and, this being preeminently the play stage, the child 
is not successful in cooperative games. Ample op- 
portunity for unorganized, unhampered, spontaneous 
activity on the part of every child should be the play 
ideal of every kindergarten and elementary school. 

Work. In considering the work appropriate to 
this stage of the child's development, some things 
need to be restated as a basis for discussion: (1) that 
the end of work is a definite product — physical 
or mental; (2) that this is the stage of imitation 
and suggestion par excellence; (3) that the accessory 
muscles are not under good control; and (4) that 
the child's mental life is made up chiefly of percepts, 
reproduced images, and crude products of the im- 
agination. 

Taking up these points in the order named, we note 
first that the child should be required to do only those 
things for which he has a fair degree of efficiency; 
otherwise the end for which work is intended is de- 



The Training of Young Children 137 

feated and through the force of habit a positive injury 
may come to the child. But those things for which 
he does have a fair degree of capability, he should be 
required to do. For, if it be true that at this time all 
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it is also 
true that all play and no work makes Jack a mere toy. 
The principle is equally applicable in the fields of 
mental and physical work. 

In making pedagogical deductions from the second 
point, viz. that this is preeminently the stage of sug- 
gestion and imitation, we might say in passing that 
both common observation and psychological research 
have shown the truth of the statement. 

What the child gets through suggestion at this stage 
amounts to infinitely more in every way than what he 
gets in the form of precepts. To illustrate: neither 
formal grammar nor even language lessons is necessary 
to insure good usage on the part of the child who has 
lived among people who speak correctly; and no 
amount of both will insure correct usage on the part 
of the child who is not so situated. A year's change 
of residence served to alter in every way the pronun- 
ciation of .two children aged three and six, while the 
pronunciation of their parents was entirely unaffected. 
Such cases could be multiplied indefinitely. In fact, 



138 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

suggestion and imitation are the basis for the develop- 
ment of language in both the race and the individual, 
and should be the chief and, aside from incidental 
correction, the only means of helping the child in his 
language at this time. Let the child hear correct usage 
and as soon as he is able to read let him have access to 
a variety of well- written story-books, and he will be 
helped infinitely more than by any amount of formal 
instruction. The latter method of helping the child 
not only fails in its purpose, but even does positive 
harm, inasmuch as it prematurely brings him to a 
consciousness of his own mistakes and of errors of 
which he would otherwise happily remain entirely 
ignorant. The language ideal at this time is satura- 
tion in good forms. Let the eye and especially the 
ear feast upon good language, but never make the 
child acutely conscious of the fact that one thing is 
good and something else is bad. An acute conscious- 
ness of good usage is only second in harmfulness to an 
acute consciousness of bad usage. This is the ripe 
age at which to give the child a start in the foreign lan- 
guages, provided he is so situated that he may apply 
both eye and ear to the work. If those with whom he 
associates use the foreign language, and if the litera- 
ture at his disposal is written in this language, he will 



The Training of Young Children 139 

at this time learn the second language almost as easily 
as he did his mother tongue. But, if he hears the 
mother tongue only or mostly, and the foreign lan- 
guage merely in the class room, it would perhaps be 
better to defer the work until a later stage. 

In the second and third points under consideration 
we have ground for determining the nature of the 
manual work suitable for this stage. 

Since President G. Stanley Hall's first lectures upon 
the subject some years ago, and the publication of 
Burk's work * on the development of the nervous 
system from fundamental to accessory, many kinder- 
gartners have very wisely discarded work which re- 
quires fine movement and delicate adjustment, such 
as fine needlework, work upon delicately perforated 
cardboards, and the laying of small sticks; and they 
have harmonized their requirements in writing more 
with the facts of modern physiology and psychology, 
by making greater use of the blackboard and allowing 
children to do this work on a larger and freer scale in 
every way. The effect of the later methods upon 
drawing has been equally wholesome, and this, together 

1 Frederick Burk, " From Fundamental to Accessory in the Devel- 
opment of the Nervous System and of Movements." Pedagogical 
Seminary, October, 1898. 



140 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

with the facts brought out by Lukens and Barnes 
from their study of children, gives a pretty safe basis 
for determining the drawing work to be done at this 
stage. The researches of Ross, 1 Bryan, 2 and Burk 3 
indicate that from the standpoint of physiology and 
psychology the work in drawing at this time should 
be just what Lukens and Barnes have found it to be 
when the child is unhampered and left perfectly free 
to express himself. The studies of the former show 
that there is but little peripheral control at this time, 
but with proper practice control may be developed rap- 
idly at seven or eight years of age, while the studies of 
the latter show that the earliest drawings of the child 
are apt to be mere scribbles. The former have shown 
that the child is incapable of fine movements and deli- 
cate adjustments but can easily make larger move- 
ments, and the latter have shown that after the scribble 
stage the child naturally draws with a few large telling 
lines, making the drawing quite simple. Lukens 
agrees with Barnes in his thought that this is the time 

1 James Ross, " Handbook of the Diseases of the Nervous System." 
Churchill, London. 

2 William L. Bryan, " The Development of Voluntary Motor Ability." 
American Journal of Psychology, November, 1892. 

3 Frederick Burk, " On the Development of Voluntary Motor Abil- 
ity." American Journal of Psychology, Vol. V. 



The Training of Young Children 141 

for the alphabets of drawing, but that the technique or 
grammar of the subject should be deferred till a later 
time, say about the ninth year ; and Mr. Henry T. 
Bailey, in the Massachusetts Report of the Board of 
Education, says that, "If the power to draw is not 
acquired before the end of the ninth year, it is not 
acquired in the public schools." ! 

Inasmuch as our purpose here is to set out in relief 
the stages in child development with some of the more 
obvious pedagogical deductions only, the subject of 
drawing as such cannot be discussed fully ; we can 
consider merely some of the primal facts that will 
serve as guides in working out the details. As the 
ideal at this stage, on the side of physiology and psy- 
chology, should be not so much a definite product as 
a bridging over from the unorganized, uncontrolled 
movements at the beginning of this stage to a higher 
degree of mental and physical coordination and con- 
trol at its close, so at this time the ideal in drawing 
should be not so much one who can draw, but rather 
a movement away from scribble to plain definite lines 
whose combinations have some meaning. (Great 
care should be taken to avoid arrest of development 

1 Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1 894-1 895. 
Boston, Mass., 1896. 



142 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

either from crowding, retardation, or reversion.) 
Since suggestion plays so important a role at this time, 
"interest in drawing should be early developed by 
giving children access to an abundance of good pic- 
tures, illustrated books and magazines, plates of great 
men and great scenes, and great sculptures, paintings, 
and edifices. These helps are of the utmost impor- 
tance in all art education, and should be in the en- 
vironment of the child from the beginning. Drawing 
thus becomes a pleasure to children, and they acquire 
considerable skill without any instruction." * 

The general principles in a rational course in draw- 
ing would serve equally well in other lines of manual 
work. Local conditions will be a determining factor 
in the technique of all of this work, but not in the 
principles underlying it. In all of the manual work 
up to seven or eight years of age, the spontaneity of 
the child should be allowed to assert itself. Many 
will naturally begin with other forms than drawing. 
Some take to paper- cutting first, and follow this 
cut with drawing. I have seen pictures of animals, 
by a boy seven years of age, so true to life that 

1 Herman T. Lukens, "A Study of Children's Drawings in the 
Early Years." Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, Vol. IV, pp. 
79-uo. 



The Training of Young Children 143 

even the mental mood of the animal could easily be 
detected. Although the pictures in themselves were 
plain, the conception and execution showed a poten- 
tial artist. This work for him was, above all things 
else, a mode of expression, just as speaking, writing, 
or drawing are for other children. It was followed by 
coloring and writing, with unusually rapid progress in 
both. It is difficult to guess what the result would 
have been if this child, at the age of four or five, had 
been required to conform to a cut-and-dried course of 
manual work. But we cannot take what this child 
did so well as evidence that all children of his age 
should do a certain amount of paper-cutting. The 
valuable pedagogical suggestion here is that children 
should be supplied in the home and in the school 
with a variety of materials and have an opportunity to 
express themselves with perfect freedom. 

If the development of the race and the child have 
any pedagogical significance, this period is evidently 
the ripe time for beginning the study of nature. We 
are not, neither shall we be, free from the need of and 
interest in the three fundamental human requisites, viz. 
food, clothing, and shelter. The poet and the philoso- 
pher cannot prosper on rhyme and speculation alone. 
They, as well as the scientist and the laborer, must have 



144 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

life before they have their own peculiar lives ; they, too, 
must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. We have here a 
center in which the interests of all humanity con- 
verge. The poorest and the most ignorant have little 
more, and the most favored have nothing that can be 
substituted for these same fundamentals. The need 
for biologic knowledge was the first and continues to be 
the primary need of life. To know in some way which 
■things are for us and which against us, which will 
cure and which will kill ; in short, to know the life with 
which and in which we live is our primary need. This 
is true not only chronologically, but logically and bio- 
logically as well. There is no escape from it. If 
there is any truth in the " recapitulation theory," and 
if the natural spontaneous interest of the child is to 
be a determining factor in the selection of material 
for the kindergarten and elementary school, it would 
seem to be a serious error to omit those things which 
have been the earliest and most persistent elements in 
the development of the race and in* which the child 
finds his greatest delight. 

It would be outside the scope of this book to dis- 
cuss the standpoints, sources, and methods in nature 
study. Suffice it to say that the most prevailing stand- 
points are what are known as the (i) mytho-poetic, 



The Training of Young Children 145 

(2) human value relation, (3) ethical value, (4) aesthetic 
value, (5) intellectual value. None of these is all- 
comprehensive and, indeed, it may be that all of them 
are not, but each will serve as an organizing idea for 
the work. A pedagogical question which arises is, 
In which order should these different ideas be devel- 
oped? The interest of the child must determine this 
very largely. Perhaps, for young children, better and 
more varied results can be gotten from the mytho- 
poetic standpoint. Perhaps, for the adolescent, the 
standpoint of ethical values can be used most effec- 
tively. We see here how intricately related are all the 
problems and phases of pedagogy. To plan a course 
in nature study, one not only needs to know nature as 
it is to-day, but also the cultural stages through which 
the race has passed, and above all one needs to be a 
student of children. Whoever tries to solve this or 
any other pedagogical problem from the standpoint 
of some little phase of work in which he may have 
particular interest is more apt to go wrong than right. 
The great text-book of nature is open before us. In 
this, both the race and the child find their primary 
and fundamental needs supplied, and their first and 
most abiding interest awakened. In the kindergarten 
and the elementary school, when practicable, the care 



146 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

and culture of animals and plants should be the first 
aim ; where this is not practicable, association and 
acquaintance with them should be encouraged. This 
study should constitute the very core and heart of 
elementary education and should be secondary to no 
other phase of work. 

This is also the time to use myth and narrative his- 
tory. For the child the world is shrouded in mystery 
and peopled with strange and unheard-of beings. 
The mysterious appeals strongly to all, but especially 
to the child, whose experience is limited and to whom 
the world is largely a mystery. Although his curiosity 
for meaning is intense, the world cannot be interpreted 
to him scientifically or philosophically. Myth offers 
a splendid opportunity for introducing him to many of 
the forces and passions, hopes and fears, victories and 
defeats, that have made his world what it is. It should 
be taught as the counterpart of nature study, the one 
introducing the child to life as it is found in plants 
and animals and the other introducing him to human 
life and spirit. Following close upon myth or carried 
along with it should come narrative history — not the 
history grind, but the historical story. Children have 
great delight in change, in movement, in events. This 
is especially true where the agents are human or where 



The Training of Young Children 147 

they are conceived as possessing or being ruled by 
a spirit akin to human spirit. The child is not inter- 
ested in the intricately complex principles and pro- 
cesses of modern society, but his interest in the simple 
and more tangible beginnings is absorbing. Any 
phase of history that can be subjected to the form of 
the simple narrative story is excellent pabulum for the 
child at this time. 

There remains to be discussed the subjects of read- 
ing, writing, and arithmetic (the three R's) for children 
before their seventh or eighth year. To make more 
firm the ground on which deductions in regard to 
these subjects are to be based, let us notice some 
additional things that are true of the child and his de- 
velopment during this stage. In his address on Psychic 
Processes and Muscular Exercise, Mosso * says : — 

"In man the brain develops later than in all other 
animals, because his muscles also develop later. The 
striped muscles are more incomplete at birth in man than 
in any other animal. For this fact that the human brain 
develops so slowly I am able to discover no other reason 
than this, that at birth the organs which effect movement 
over which the brain exercises its authority are not yet 

1 Angelo Mosso, " Psychic Processes and Muscular Exercise." 
Decennial Celebration of Clark University, 1 899, pp. 383-395. Pub- 
lished by Clark University, Worcester, Mass. 



148 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

complete. Modern views show a tendency to confirm 
what the great philosophers of Greece already recognize, 
viz. that children ought to begin to read and write only 
with the tenth year; that it is injurious for the development 
of the brain to be fettered to the school desk when only 
five or six years old. Attention produces not only the same 
chemical effects and the same fatigue as muscular exertion 
does, but we feel also, when we are attentive to anything, 
the characteristic muscular strain on the occiput, the fore- 
head, and other parts of the body. The more mobile the 
extremities of an animal are, the more intelligent it is. 

"The mutual relation of intelligence and movement 
is one of the most constant factors in nature; the move- 
ments always change where intelligence changes. Micro- 
cephalic individuals have an awkward gait, and an incon- 
siderable dexterity in the movements of the hands. This 
change is still more striking in the case of idiots. When 
the brain has been fatigued by exclusively intellectual 
activity, the sensitiveness of the hand and direct irrita- 
bility of the muscles are also decreased. The influence of 
the hand upon the development of a language is evident 
from the fact that an aphasic patient is made to write in 
order that he may gradually regain the power of speech. 
The relation between muscular movements and conscious 
processes is so intimate that when the arms and hands of 
a hypnotized person are brought into certain positions, 
and certain muscles by external contact made to contract, 
certain emotions are induced corresponding to those mus- 
cular contractions." 



The Training of Young Children 149 

But as has already been noted, Ross, Bryan, and 
Burk have shown that before seven or eight years of 
age the child is to a high degree ineffective as a motor 
being. The work of Lukens and Barnes on drawing, 
as well as common observation by every one, reen- 
forces the thought. If there is, then, this close paral- 
lelism between movement on the one hand and psychic 
processes on the other, as is claimed by Mosso, it must 
follow that inasmuch as movements are spontaneous, 
uncoordinated, and but slightly under the voluntary 
control of the child, so will his thoughts likewise be 
spontaneous, flitting, and illogical; and this is exactly 
what we find in everyday observation. Dr. Vulpius 
has studied the fibers which horizontally traverse the 
surface of the hemispheres, which he calls the tan- 
gential fibers. These appear on the outer layer of 
the cortex in the fifth month of life; in the seventh 
month the tangential fibers can be found in the deep 
layers; while in the layer between, the cross fibers 
appear only after a year. "In the child of eight, and 
perhaps even of seven years, the fibers of the cortex 
and medullary substances are complete in number and 
caliber, and have taken the same arrangement as in 
the adult. It is during the development of the 
brain and the nervous system before birth and during 



150 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

these first years of growth that malnutrition and per- 
verted action occur, which result in defective mental 
power." The point in this that needs to be empha- 
sized here is the close relation between nervous nutri- 
tion and mental power. Neurologists and students 
of children's diseases all agree that up to seven or 
eight years of age is the period when the effects of bad 
heredity are brought out, owing to the rapid rate of 
growth and the instability of the organism. If, as Hurd 
says, in the process of education, energy designed to 
further the growth of the brain is dissipated in func- 
tional activity, hereditary tendencies to disease become 
thereby developed, or the development of the brain is 
limited and defects become evident which under more 
favorable circumstances would not have existed. 

In summarizing the foregoing considerations we 
reach these conclusions : (1) A close relation exists 
between movement and intelligence. (2) The child's 
movements are uncoordinated and spontaneous. 
(3) Therefore the child's mental life at this time is apt 
to be spontaneous, flitting, and illogical. (4) The 
brain is developing primarily in growth and not in 
function. (5) We should, therefore, expect a very 
simple kind of mental life. (6) The necessity is for 
brain nutrition and not brain functioning to bridge 



The Training of Young Children 151 

over the period when hereditary tendencies to disease 
are most likely to be developed. 

If these things are true, a question for pedagogy to 
answer is : Are reading, arithmetic, and writing, as 
daily assigned tasks, conducive to the best development 
and highest welfare of the child? Is the amount of 
information and so-called discipline derived from the 
study of these subjects by children under eight years 
of age worth the cost? A comparison of the outlay 
with the income compels the conclusion that they are 
not worth the cost. The work in these subjects violates 
the foregoing principles of child life and development 
during this stage. 

First let us notice reading in the light of the sum- 
marized statement of facts. Perhaps no one who 
reads this will remember his own peculiar psychology 
when he learned to read his mother tongue, but most 
will remember their experience in learning a foreign 
language. Students of the French and the German 
languages find at first that if they are very careful 
about their pronunciation, they are apt to go over a 
page without extracting the thought ; on the other 
hand, they find that if they are anxious about the 
thought, their pronunciation is bad. Young men and 
women find it very difficult to get both faultless form 



152 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

and meaning until they have spent many years upon 
the language. And yet we require the child, with 
his simple, undeveloped, uncoordinated physical and 
mental life, to perform an even more difficult task. 
Who does not remember what a difficult thing it was, 
in reading the foreign language, even to keep the 
place? But this is only one element in the child's 
difficulty; he must hold his book up, hold it open, 
keep the place, and by close attention and delicate 
adjustment of the eyes, he must decipher the charac- 
ters in themselves and keep them related to each other, 
and then we expect him to keep the meaning and read 
with spirit and understanding. The performance of 
such a task is not only injurious, but in most cases im- 
possible, and its requirement is positively cruel. Such 
work should not be a fixed daily task of the child until 
there is a fair degree of muscular coordination and 
control, and mental strength commensurate to such 
physical development. It should not be required until 
he has passed the period for the cropping out of weak 
hereditary tendencies due to instability of organiza- 
tion and rapid growth, which would be at about the 
age of nine or ten. For essentially the same reasons, 
work in arithmetic and penmanship should be taken 
up, if at all, only incidentally during this early stage. 



The Training of Young Children 153 

Aside from the purely concrete number work, arith- 
metic is sufficiently abstract and general to demand 
at least a fair degree of brain functioning and the 
ability to direct attention and to carry on, in a simple 
way at least, the processes of abstraction, association, 
and generalization. There is nothing in the physiology 
or psychology of development which indicates that the 
average child of seven or eight is capable of these 
things. By constant appeals to the child, together 
with scolding and threatening, a few arithmetical 
facts may be hammered into his head, but no one 
would ever guess that he could do anything worth 
while with these facts outside of the schoolroom; on 
the contrary, every one who has given the matter 
even passing attention knows that he cannot. If the 
child should give all the time and energy that are 
worse than wasted on arithmetic to sensible work in 
nature study, myth, and narrative history, for which 
he has both interest and ability, the world would 
be revealed to him in innumerable ways, learning 
would not be a drudgery and a bore, and time would 
be found for the introduction of many kinds of work 
that have a real significance and value for him. He 
would gain more effective arithmetical knowledge 
and ability incidentally in connection with the sub- 



154 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

jects of vital interest and importance than are gained 
by the humdrum, formal study of the dry-as-dust 
arithmetic. 

Reading and arithmetic should not be taught as 
formal subjects until the close of the transitional 
period at about the age of nine or ten. The conserv- 
atism which keeps us doing things simply because 
we have been doing them must be broken away from 
whenever there is ground for so doing, and especially 
when it is plain that there is a better thing to do. 
When reading and arithmetic constituted almost the 
entire curriculum, child life and its development were 
not the criterion. Social rather than physiological 
and psychological facts were the determining factors. 
Professor Dewey has well said that: "The primary 
school grew practically out of the popular movement 
of the sixteenth century when, along with the invention 
of printing and the growth of commerce, it became a 
business necessity to know how to read, write, and 
figure. The aim was distinctly a practical one; it 
was utility — getting command of these tools, the 
symbols of learning, not for the sake of learning but 
because it gave access to careers in life otherwise 
closed." The social aspect of education to-day 
should not be ignored in the planning of school work, 



The Training of Young Children 155 

but it should not be emphasized to the hurt of the 
child. Any attempt at curriculum making or educa- 
tional procedure which does not take into account the 
laws and stages of development of the one to be 
taught, is apt to go wide of the mark and result in 
positive injury. 

Conduct. In deducing some of the more general 
principles which underlie the conduct and moral train- 
ing of the child up to seven years of age, we must here, 
as in his play and work, make our determinations 
from the standpoint of the child himself and not from 
the standpoint of the adult. Two points must be 
borne in mind. (1) Many things which would be 
immoral for the adult have no moral significance what- 
ever for the child. (2) The child's standard of moral- 
ity, so far as he can be said to have a standard, does 
not come to him so much by intuition as by precept, 
and not so much by precept as by unconscious sug- 
gestion and imitation. The first point will be help- 
ful in determining the content of morality for the 
child, and the second will serve as a guide in deter- 
mining the method in moral training. 

Nothing could be more deadening to the develop- 
ment of the child than an attempt to make him con- 
form in every way to the moral standard of the adult. 



156 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

Because the child appropriates at this age that which 
does not belong to him, he is not therefore a thief as 
his father would be under the same conditions. Be- 
cause the child in the vividness of his imagination does 
not adhere strictly to the literal truth, he is not there- 
fore a liar. Because the child connives in every con- 
ceivable way to attain a desirable end, he is not there- 
fore a trickster; and because the naked child, even 
at seven or eight, manifests no sense of shame, he is 
not therefore immoral. From the standpoint of the 
adult these things would all be serious breaches of 
morality, while from the standpoint of the child they 
have little or no moral significance. But there will 
come a time in the life of the child when these very 
things will have moral significance. 

The pedagogical question is: What can be done 
for the child at this time which will result in a sense 
of right and wrong and a disposition to do the one 
and avoid the other, but which will not result in prud- 
ishness or a precocious and morbid sense of moral 
delinquency? Prudishness and moral morbidness, 
above all things else, must be avoided during these 
years. Better no sense of morality at all than that 
the child of six or seven should either hold himself up 
as a bright and shining example of right conduct, or 



The Training of Young Children 157 

that he should magnify his childish mistakes into car- 
dinal and unpardonable sins. Such moral attitudes 
are far more hopeless, even, than almost any other 
childish misdemeanor. It is not good for the child 
to be acutely conscious either of his goodness or his 
badness. His mind for the most part should be, and 
under normal conditions will be, occupied with some- 
thing other than self. It is in this connection that 
direct, positive, moral training at this time not only 
fails to accomplish desirable ends, but does positive 
harm; the child and his behavior are apt to be the 
topic of discussion. For this reason, in all attempts 
to teach morals, an indirect method — the reading 
of a story, the relating of an incident, and the like — 
is superior in every way to the more direct treatment, 
which should be held in reserve for special cases. We 
often teach the child to discern the right from the 
wrong, and admonish him to cleave to the one and 
forsake the other, only to find that as a result of our 
teaching, or in spite of it, the second state of that child 
is worse than the first. As a rule, the discriminations 
that he is capable of making are not effective in deter- 
mining the course that he will pursue. Fine discrimi- 
nations and admonitions are apt to be valuable in 
proportion to their scarcity. 



158 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

Nowhere in the development of the child do sug- 
gestion and imitation play so lasting and important 
a role as in the development of morals and conduct. 
As nothing helps the child so much in the acquisition 
and use of good language forms as saturation in good 
language forms, oral and written, so nothing will 
instill within him the habit of using pure rather than 
vulgar language so much as association with those 
who always use pure language. No amount of moral- 
izing on the sinfulness of lying will help the child so 
much as living with people who always speak the 
truth; and nothing will more readily and effectively 
develop in the child a sense of personal and property 
rights than association with those who are careful to 
observe the rights of their fellows, and who do not 
appropriate to their own use that which does not 
belong to them. The first great concern of parents 
and teachers who are interested in the morals of their 
children, should be their own behavior. 

The moral ideal for the stage of childhood is inno- 
cence of right and wrong, morally considered. Every 
child knows that there are some things that may be 
done and some that may not. This knowledge should 
come to him as a matter of course. He soon learns 
to keep his hands out of the fire because he doesn't 



The Training of Young Children 159 

like the result of putting them into it ; and so he must 
early learn to desist from many things for the same 
simple reason that he doesn't like the consequence; 
but he does not, neither can he, look upon these things 
as right or wrong in themselves. I have known chil- 
dren to repeat the oaths of their elders with as little 
sense of guilt as if they were repeating the catechism, 
and in so doing they were not immoral. The danger, 
however, is that, having the language at their com- 
mand, they will find it but a short step to supply the 
content which means profanity. Something should 
be done to prevent such results. Prohibition of the 
use of such language, with little or no emphasis upon 
the naughtiness of it, is the most rational and effective 
remedy. And so it is with the child's conduct in gen- 
eral. He must obey the word of his elders. The 
experience of the parent and the teacher must count 
for something, else what is the significance of parent- 
hood or control in school? 

There will come a time when the child should be 
thrown upon his own responsibility — left more or less 
free to do as he desires; but not so in his early 
years. Indeed, at the beginning of life, so far are 
we removed from the possibilities of such an ideal 
that implicit obedience should be insisted upon. 



160 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

Some one has wisely said, "If the child does not obey 
when first commanded, he should be punished ; but 
if the teacher even succeeds in securing obedience 
after he has commanded many times, he, and not the 
child, should be punished." Teachers must know 
how demoralizing it is to keep nagging at children. 
They must know also that there are some requests 
whose reasonableness cannot be explained to the 
child. In such cases implicit, unquestioned obedience 
should be expected. 

The child with a healthy mind does not contemplate 
the wickedness of one possible line of action and the 
goodness of another line, and upon the basis of this 
discrimination determine his act. If he be a normal 
child, he desists from doing certain things, because 
he has learned that these are things that must not be 
done, and he falls into the habit of letting them alone. 
On the other hand, if he be a normal child, he does 
certain things over and over again, until his habit of 
action begins to take form. And thus the child should 
pass from his childhood into the early years of youth 
with the alphabets of moral habits pretty firmly fixed, 
but in no sense a contemplator of deeds. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SECOND DENTITION 

In passing from the stage of childhood to that of 
youth, at about the age of eight, there is a marked 
transition period which has many of the characteristics 
of the preceding stage, and at the same time develops 
new features peculiar to the stage that follows it. 
As in the other transitional periods, no hard and fast 
lines can be drawn, but in general the time is between 
seven or eight years of age at the beginning and nine 
or ten at the close. During these years old things 
are passing away and new ones appearing. 

At about seven or eight years of age the brain has 
approximated its full weight, and is changing in its 
development from increase in size to increase in func- 
tion. Along with this there is a change in the rate 
of bodily growth ; so that the annual increase will be 
greater at the beginning of this stage than it has been 
through the stage of childhood. The child is losing 
his first teeth and the permanent ones are coming. 
This more objective and superficial change seen in 

161 



1 62 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the case of the teeth has many physical and mental 
counterparts ; the child is not quite at his best either 
physically or mentally. 

Doubtless many of the disturbances of this time 
are due to bad nutrition, which finds its cause in im- 
proper mastication of the food, the child sometimes 
lacking as many as three or four teeth at a time. This 
same thing is seen in many of the domestic animals, 
notably the horse, which gets its second teeth at the 
age of four. Dealers in horses for the market will 
not buy under five years of age. Their stock remark 
is that a horse at four is of no account. While this 
is not literally true, any one who has handled young 
horses knows that a four-year-old does not have the 
endurance or the trustworthiness of a three-year-old. 
Reggner * observed that young monkeys often sicken 
and die of fever when shedding their milk teeth, and 
the same process is certainly not free from risk in the 
human subject. Nervous children often become ema- 
ciated during its progress, or suffer from neuralgia or 
cough ; and from having been hardy and robust, they be- 
come pale and delicate. Apparently in connection with 
the second dentition also, complaints are sometimes 
made of headache, tenderness of the eyes, and lassitude. 

1 J. Crichton Brown, " Education of the Nervous System." 



Significance of the Second Dentition 163 

At this period is encountered also that curious and 
sometimes puzzling perversion of the moral nature, 
known as malingering. From egotism and insatiable 
craving for notice and sympathy, from a desire to 
escape work, from jealousy, or from some more com- 
plex motive, the boy or girl simulates disease — and 
may do so with considerable ingenuity and success — 
or exaggerates some trifling ailment. The disorder 
is generally poverty of the blood and nervousness, 
which not rarely are connected with constitutional 
changes associated with the second dentition. 

There is a change in the vascular system at this 
time. Krohn has found that the child of eight is 
fatigued much more easily than one of six or seven or 
one nine years of age. There is apt to be dilation of 
the heart and cardiac incompetence, such as shortness 
of breath and readiness of fatigue. The reason for the 
dilated heart at this time is the sudden increase in weight 
of the child without corresponding increase in size of 
heart muscle. The dilation or tendency to dilation and 
fatigue curves represent the fact that the child must 
conserve his strength until his heart grows to its work. 

Dr. Christopher says : — 

"We must recognize that the period from seven to nine 
years of age, quite irrespective of the other conditions of 



164 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

the life of the child, is one in which fatigue occurs very 
readily and is one in which damage to the heart is likely 
to be produced. This period in child life is one to which 
special attention should be called because of the extremely 
insidious character of its approach. It is not only in phys- 
ical fatigue that it manifests itself, but in mental fatigue 
and in the exhibition of many nervous symptoms otherwise 
utterly unaccountable. 

"One of the commonest manifestations is the appear- 
ance of general laziness on the part of the child, and it is 
extremely common to conclude that the child needs more 
exercise. As a matter of course it is perfectly evident 
that, of all things, the child does not need more exercise 
at this period, but in every way its force should be con- 
served and its labors reduced to the smallest possible degree 
consistent with the maintenance of health. The duration 
of this period lasts occasionally a few months, although 
in a number of instances I have known it to last two years 
and even longer, during which time the child's failure 
to develop sufficient progress at school, and its manifesta- 
tions of unpleasant nervous symptoms have been the cause 
of great anxiety on the part of parents. It is clear that the 
school work during this period of life should be dimin- 
ished to a point below that which has been done the pre- 
vious year and which may be undertaken safely the next 
year." * 

1 W. S. Christopher, " Three Crises in Child Life." Child Study 
Monthly \ December, 1897. 



Significance of the Second Dentition 165 

The studies of Jastrow 2 indicate that at this time 
there is a transition, change, or stage in the develop- 
ment of the special senses, notably the sense of sight. 
The results of his investigations and observations 
show that children who lose their sight before about 
seven years of age (the time coincides approximately 
with the time for the full weight of the brain) do not 
have visual images, and, as a rule, those who lose their 
sight after this time have them. This, perhaps, does 
not point so much to a change in the development 
of the organ as it does to a central change. However 
this may be, it is significant as marking a time of tran- 
sition in the course of development, and is fraught 
with great pedagogical value, not only for those who 
teach all classes of blind people, but also for those who 
teach normally developed people. 

One of the most striking changes that occur at this 
time is to be seen in the entirely different nature of 
the somatic diseases preceding and following this 
period. During the stage of infancy, from two to 
seven, is the time for infectious diseases, and after 
this time, as Holt shows in his treatise on "The Dis- 
eases of Infancy and Childhood," there is a transi- 

2 Joseph Jastrow, "The Dreams of the Blind." New Princeton 
Review, 1888, Vol. V. 



1 66 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

tion from the infectious diseases of childhood to 
the diseases which are more often found in adults 
than in children. The change in nervous diseases 
at seven or eight indicates even more clearly than 
does the change in somatic diseases that this is a 
time of transition. Before this time — which Clous- 
ton * designates as the period of most rapid brain 
growth, special sense education, motor coordinations, 
and speech — the prevailing nervous diseases are con- 
vulsions, squint, stammering, backwardness of speech, 
night terrors, infantile paralysis, tubercular menin- 
gitis, hydrocephalus, and rickets. "Every one of 
these," he says, "can be connected with the immense 
brain growth of the period, with the development of 
certain essential brain functions at this time, such as 
speech equilibration and the other essential muscular 
coordinations, with the intense trophic activity, and 
with the rapid metabolism of every tissue, with edu- 
cation of function of special sense organs and their 
brain centers." 

The character of the nervous diseases which follow 
this short transitional period in most cases differs very 
greatly from that of the diseases preceding it. We 
have now, says Clouston, the period when muscular 

1 T. S. Clouston, " The Neurosis of Development." 



Significance of the Second Dentition 167 

motion becomes coordinated fully with emotion, as 
seen especially in facial expression ; and the nervous 
diseases which characterize the years from eight or 
nine to thirteen or fourteen are chorea, some forms 
of epilepsy and somnambulism, megrim, asthma, and 
some eye defects. 

In this transitional period, at about eight years of 
age, there are as many striking indications of physical 
disturbance and readjustment as are found in the 
pubescent period about which so much has been 
written and spoken. Doubtless if the period at eight 
carried with it any objective sign of the birth of a 
function so deep-seated and universal as is the sex 
function, it would not have been long in receiving the 
attention due it, for in other ways the changes which 
occur at about eight are even more striking than those 
that occur at about thirteen. 

As was said in the introduction of this topic, the 
life at this time is both retrospective and prophetic. 
We have both the traces of the stage preceding it, and 
suggestions of the stage following. Part of the child's 
teeth are temporary and part of them are permanent; 
the child's brain, although it has approximated its 
growth in size and is turning toward development 
of function, nevertheless continues to grow at a slow 



1 68 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

rate, and functions often inaccurately and with diffi- 
culty. The vascular system is as it was, while the 
muscular system has taken a sudden leap ahead, and 
the disproportion in the development of these two 
systems at this time results in cardiac incompetence 
and fatigue. The somatic and nervous diseases are 
about evenly divided between those characteristic of 
the stage preceding and the one following. There 
seems to be no abrupt change in the development 
of the senses at this time, and yet the period is sig- 
nificant, inasmuch as those who lose their sense of 
sight before this time are apt not to have visual images 
and those who lose their sense of hearing before this 
time are apt not to have auditory images. 

This, then, is a time of readjustment in the vas- 
cular, muscular, and nervous systems, and of great 
disturbance in the functions of circulation, digestion, 
and nutrition. Coming at about the age of eight, 
when the child is apt to be in his third or fourth year 
of school, these facts are fraught with great peda- 
gogical significance. It seems evident that the child 
is not capable of the same amount of physical and 
mental activity and endurance as he was at six or 
seven or as he will be at nine or ten, and this fact in 
itself would demand on the one hand a decrease in 



Significance of the Second Dentition 169 

the amount of work required, and on the other hand 
the provision of ample opportunities for pleasant 
recreation and amusement and quiet rest. 

Dr. Jackson says, referring to the disorders inci- 
dental to the second dentition: "The remedies which 
I have found most useful are as follows : First, a 
relief from study or from regular tasks, yet using 
books as far as they afford agreeable occupation and 
amusement. Second, exercise in the open air, pre- 
ferring the mode most agreeable to the patient and 
in most grave cases the removal from the town to the 
country." 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE PEDAGOGY OF YOUTH 

Although no two records on the growth of chil- 
dren coincide throughout, there seems to be a general 
agreement that at about eight or nine years of age 
comes a sudden increase followed by a slight decrease 
in annual increment until the time just preceding 
puberty. So far as is known there is nothing peculiar 
in the development of the nervous system at this time. 
There seems to be a steady development of the func- 
tioning power of the brain and a very slight increase 
in its weight. These years of slow growth from about 
nine to twelve or thirteen years mark a third definite 
stage in the development of the child. Both the 
physical and psychical life are unique and demand 
a unique pedagogy. The child is not simply his 
former self grown larger; he is in many ways an 
altogether different being. The transitional period 
from seven to nine has served to transform him not 
only nominally, but actually, from the stage of child- 
hood to that of youth. 

170 



The Pedagogy of Youth 171 

The chances for life are better now than they have 
been heretofore, the girls being least susceptible to 
disease at eleven (3.23 per 1000) and the boys at 
twelve (3.42 per iooo). 1 The somatic diseases to 
which the child is liable, although not peculiar to this 
stage of youth, are almost entirely different from those 
of the preceding stage; while the nervous diseases to 
which he is most liable are to a high degree peculiar 
to this stage. The heart muscle has increased in 
size proportionately to the size of the body and so 
fatigue is less easily induced than at the age of eight. 
"Sensation, special and common, and its organs have 
been developed ; muscular coordination has pro- 
gressed far ; and many of the mental faculties, such 
as memory, fancy, and emotion, have all acquired 
some strength ; but muscular action has not been fully 
coordinated with feeling, and this is the period of 
life when this coordination takes place." 2 

This is the period of endurance and of coordination, 
mental and physical, and mental with physical ; the 
time for the storing up of reserve power and the es- 
tablishment of automatisms — the essential forerunner 

1 E. M. Hartwell. Report on Physical Training in the Boston Pub- 
lic Schools, 1893 an( i x 895. (Boston, Mass.) 

2 T. S. Clouston, "The Neurosis of Development." (Morison, Lec- 
tures for 1890.) Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1891, p. 138. 



172 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

of the reproductive function. It is the intermediate 
stage of life between the stages of greatest brain 
growth and of highest functional advance; between 
the pure gathering in of egoism and the appearance 
of the higher altruism. Above all things else this is 
the "laying up," the "salting down" stage of child 
life. 

As before, let us consider the stage of youth from 
the threefold standpoint of play, conduct, and work. 

Play. In regard to the child's play at this time, 
the principles recognized in the earlier stage should 
not be lost sight of here. The play should be un- 
hampered, spontaneous, and careless of ends. But 
other elements enter now which were not present 
before. This is the time when the transition is made 
from the purely individual games and plays to the full- 
fledged cooperative games. Every nine-year-old boy 
has his "nine" and "eleven" or belongs to the teams 
of some other boy. From the immediate artistic 
standpoint all such cooperative play is a failure, but 
its mental and physical significance to those who 
participate can hardly be gainsaid. At first the cap- 
tain of a team will often be unable to hold his men 
together long enough for a single game; a bruised 
finger, a bad start, an imaginary slight sustained by 



The Pedagogy of Youth 173 

a prominent member of the team, and a multitude 
of equally trifling matters play havoc with the captain's 
organizing genius. 

These things are not so true of the twelve-year-old 
team. Three years have served to work a transfor- 
mation. Now teams are organized that remain in- 
tact all the season; almost every town has its " North 
Enders," "South Enders," "West Siders," and 
"East Siders." Whereas the nine-year-olds hardly 
knew the "outs" from the "ins," the twelve-year- 
olds know the game as well as the most inveterate 
"rooters." Furthermore, they have attained the mus- 
cular strength and coordination to execute it. Hand 
in hand with this development of muscular strength 
and control have gone mental strength and control. 
The team hangs together after a half-dozen crushing 
defeats; they do not disband because the pitcher has 
an off day or because the center rush fumbles. They 
have learned that to have one's own way absolutely 
in play means to play alone, and that teamwork 
means self-control in the highest sense. 

Aside from health, which should be the chief con- 
sideration, the great gains to be derived from play at 
this time are to be seen in the increased mental and 
physical control developed in cooperative games and 



174 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

plays. Along with this control and subjection of 
one's whims and caprices for the sake of the group, 
there must be found the same spontaneity and free- 
dom that characterizes the stage up to seven. The 
chief difference lies in this, that whereas in the earlier 
stage the plea is for the absolute freedom and spon- 
taneity of the individual, here we must insist upon the 
same degree of freedom and spontaneity on the part 
of the group. There the individual quit playing with 
his doll and began playing with his toes at will. 
Here the group quits playing ball and begins playing 
war at will. There the child exercised the initiative 
in every particular. Here the group exercises this 
prerogative. There must, in the latter as in the 
former case, be absolute freedom from external con- 
trol. Better that a team should disband a dozen 
times a day than that it should be organized by 
the captain's father and sustained through paternal 
compulsion. 

Moreover, one of the things that every child must 
learn sooner or later is that if he is to live in society 
there are some things he may do and many things he 
may not do. One of the hardest lessons that a boy 
has to learn who moves from the country into the 
city is that he cannot throw stones in every direction. 



The Pedagogy of Youth 175 

It is not easy for him to reconcile himself to the propo- 
sition that all his throwing must be straight up. 
But that is the price one must pay for social life. 
There is no place where this lesson can be taught so 
naturally and brought home to the child so forcibly 
and in a way that will be accepted so readily as in 
his own cooperative games and plays. Thus uncon- 
sciously to the child and entirely incidentally has come 
to him one of the most essential and fundamental 
lessons of social life. 

Conduct. In the following discussion of work for 
this stage, and in the discussion of conduct for the 
previous stage, most things that bear upon conduct 
at this time are given. All of the principles suggested 
for the earlier stage should be observed here. But it 
must not be forgotten that the child's notion of right 
and wrong has developed pari passu with his physical 
and mental development. He should, therefore, be 
held responsible for his conduct in a way that here- 
tofore would have been unjust. Insight and rational 
sympathy on the part of teacher and parent are of 
the greatest importance. Judicious but close disci- 
pline should be exercised. While the fundamentals 
for work as suggested below are being drilled into 
the child at this time, it is just as necessary that the 



176 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

fundamentals in conduct should not be slighted. No 
task should be set that is too difficult for the child to 
perform, and no performance should be accepted 
that is not well done. Irremediable injury will come 
to the child who is allowed to approximate roughly 
a standard in work and conduct. Fairness should 
always characterize any requirement in conduct, and 
the child should be expected to fulfill this requirement 
promptly, fully, and unequivocally. These are the 
years for discipline in conduct as well as in work. 

Work. The stage from nine to thirteen differs 
from the one up to seven years in that the earlier was 
preeminently the play stage, while the latter should 
be preeminently a work stage. It was found that 
before seven the child is not apt to have developed 
mental and physical control sufficient to enable him 
to produce effectively and that he is apt to be injured 
by trying to do so. After the transitional period, at 
about eight, the average child is found to possess 
sufficient strength and mental and physical control to 
produce effectively in various ways without endanger- 
ing his health or development. It must never be lost 
sight of that an injudicious amount of work is to be 
avoided at all times. 

This, then, is the time when the child should be 



The Pedagogy of Youth 177 

initiated into hard work. It is a time, also, when 
his tissues, muscular and neural, are plastic and when 
he is largely exempt from disease. It is the time for 
drill, for practice, for discipline, and even for drudgery. 
This is in no way contradictory to the doctrine of 
spontaneity advocated for the preceding period. The 
conditions of life which have just been enumerated 
show that the child does not now run the risk of ar- 
rested development as heretofore. In the discussions 
of the spontaneity and natural interest of the child, 
one very important chapter of psychology is too little 
considered. This is the dependence of interest upon 
attention. The emphasis is almost always placed upon 
the obverse proposition that children attend to what- 
ever they have an interest in, but it is just as true that 
they are apt to become interested in whatever they 
attend to. Owing to the conditions of development, 
in the stage up to seven let them attend for most part 
to those things which attract them without assistance, 
and for this later stage of youth let them attend to 
those things which serve as the alphabets of formal 
school work, even though at times their interest in 
some lines must be induced by attention to them. 

Many lines of work which the child was capable 
of pursuing only incidentally in the previous stage 



178 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

should now be taken up in earnest, while the things 
he has been doing he should in a degree continue 
to do. 

Nature study should not be supplanted by arith- 
metic, and the story will still have its place in the 
curriculum, but the studies will be readjusted so that 
the course will be strengthened by the addition of 
subjects. Reading should now be made one of the 
daily assigned tasks. The average child by this time 
possesses the mental and physical strength and control 
which will enable him to use the instruments of read- 
ing as a source of enjoyment and information with- 
out endangering his health and robbing him of time 
that could be used much more profitably in other 
ways. The child of nine or ten will not consume 
all his energy in holding the book open, keeping the 
place, and interpreting the thought. The end to be at- 
tained should be facility in reading rather than ability 
to pronounce polysyllables. To this end there should 
be accessible to the child a well-selected list of books 
bearing upon a great variety of subjects of human 
and especially of childish interest, and he should 
have perfect freedom in the selection of his reading 
material. A great amount of oral reading should be 
encouraged. Facility to catch the thought and to 



The Pedagogy of Youth 179 

express it intelligently must be sought. The aim 
should not be to develop critics, but to master the sub- 
ject as a tool ; to become proficient in the use of it 
as a joiner is in the use of his chisel. It need hardly 
be said that the child's opportunity for such drill is 
not limited to his reading and story books, but that 
every book he uses, regardless of subject-matter, 
serves equally well. If the time given to reading 
before the child is seven years old were given to real 
things in which he has a lively interest, as was sug- 
gested in the discussion of work for that stage, he 
would bring such a fund of information and interest 
to his reading work at nine years of age that the prob- 
lem of method in teaching reading would practically 
solve itself. It has been demonstrated over and over 
again that the way for an adult to get a working mas- 
tery of a language is to become absorbingly interested 
in the subject written in that language. And so it 
is with the child. If he can arrive at this stage with 
a first-hand knowledge of and interest in rivers and 
hills, flowers and trees, birds and bugs, animals and 
people of all sorts, reading will be a key whose use 
he will not be long in learning. 

Arithmetic also should cease to be an incidental 
study and should become one of the regular studies 



180 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

of the programme. The child now possesses a fair 
degree of brain functioning power, and the ability to 
direct his attention and to carry on, in a simple way 
at least, the processes of abstraction, association, and 
generalization. He also has physical development 
sufficient to use the materials of arithmetic to some 
purpose and without injury to himself. The aim at 
this time in arithmetic should be a mastery of the 
fundamentals, the establishment of the alphabets of 
arithmetic. For two reasons this should be done. 
There will never be a time when the child can do this 
kind of work better than he can now ; and advance 
in the subject is absolutely hopeless without it. The 
child must learn to read and write numbers, whole 
numbers, fractions, decimals, and denominate numbers. 
He must learn the addition and the multiplication 
tables until, shuffle them however you will, they will 
be as familiar to him as his own name. He must be- 
come thoroughly at home in the tables of denominate 
numbers. No effort should be made to put the child 
through the book or to make a mathematician of him. 
He should not be held so much for his method as for 
his work. He should not be held for the logic of his 
work but for the performance of it. He is not neces- 
sarily ignorant of his work because he cannot explain 



The Pedagogy of Youth 181 

it. The aim in arithmetic at this stage should be 
drill upon the fundamentals until the child uses them 
with as much ease as he feeds himself. 

The foreign languages should be taken up at this 
time. Indeed, if the child is so fortunately situated 
as to hear these languages, or if skillful teachers can 
be secured, they may be taken up much earlier. But 
under no conditions should they be allowed to be de- 
ferred to a later time than this. Observation and 
testimony both show that seldom is a person who be- 
gins the study of a foreign language at a later stage 
entirely free from the accent peculiar to his own lan- 
guage and in every way as proficient as a native. 
This is the time when children manufacture language; 
when they speak the so-called "pig Latin"; when they 
distort their words and sentences ; when they com- 
municate in abbreviations ; when they use secret 
language ; when they begin to talk by gestures and 
use the deaf and dumb alphabet. It is the ripe time 
for the grafting on of new modes of expression. The 
wisest and most successful teachers of foreign lan- 
guages advocate its study at this time, and some of 
them even earlier. As in the use of the reading and 
the arithmetic book, so here the child is able to use 
the materials necessary for such study. The thing to 



1 82 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

be aimed at is facility. The conversational method 
should be used. Whoever cannot teach by this 
method should be considered unfit for the modern 
languages, as one who does not know the multipli- 
cation table without the book is unfit to teach arith- 
metic. Correct forms should be insisted upon from 
the start. This end will not be attained so much 
through a grind upon technical grammar as by reading 
and hearing good forms and exercise in the use of 
them. The ideal for the foreign languages at this 
time will be much as the ideal for the mother tongue 
was in the earlier stage, and, indeed, as it is for the 
most part in this stage : saturation in good forms, both 
oral and written, with perject freedom oj expression. 

The work in nature study will serve as the most 
natural introduction to the study of geography. The 
child's interest in his natural environment will be ex- 
tended to an interest in nature in general. Through 
his knowledge of and interest in the plants and ani- 
mals of his own region, he can easily be led into a 
study of the fauna and flora of different countries, 
and this will in its turn serve as an excellent introduc- 
tion to the study of biology a little later. In the same 
way an interest in the mineral world will bring him 
naturally to the study of geology. The child knows 



The Pedagogy of Youth 183 

that many things which he consumes in the way of 
food and clothing are not produced at home and he 
also knows from his previous work in nature study 
that these things have their origin in plants and ani- 
mals. Here is an additional incentive to study the 
plants and animals of different regions, but it serves 
its highest ends as an introduction to the study of the 
two great geographical topics of commerce and manu- 
facture. No more dreary task was ever assigned a 
child than the one of committing to memory outright 
all the agricultural and manufactured products of the 
different states in Asia or the imports and exports of 
Australia. And no more valuable or absorbingly in- 
teresting piece of work can be undertaken than the 
tracing out of the process that resulted in the shoes or 
the hat that he wears, or the salt and pepper that he 
eats. Instead of getting a few isolated facts which are 
dismissed after the recitation for others just as value- 
less, the child would thus get things in their relations, 
and the phases of original production, transportation, 
and manufacture would signify something to him. 

"Without any attempt at philosophizing — a thing to be 
studiously avoided at this time — questions which arise 
in the mind of the child are, "Why don't they raise 
pepper and cotton in New England?" — "Why is the 



184 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

meat that I eat carried from the Mississippi Valley?" 
— "How is it that the people in the plains and their 
neighbors on the mountain side produce such widely 
different things?" — "Why is Vancouver so much 
warmer than Labrador?" It need hardly be said 
that such questions show that the time is ripe for the 
study of climatic conditions — the significance of al- 
titude, latitude, ocean currents, relief, contour, move- 
ments of the earth, the change of seasons, and all the 
geographical conditions which make the products of 
one region differ so widely from those of another. The 
study of the relief of a country, its climate, and the like, 
paves the way to the geographical study which is the 
basis for history work. Children at this age can be led 
to see and to have great interest in seeing why, for 
example, Illinois does not extend a little farther west, 
Indiana a little farther south, and Massachusetts a 
little farther east ; why ancient Greece was divided into 
more than twenty states ; and why modern Switzerland 
is divided into twenty-six cantons. 

It must be admitted that these suggestions do not 
at all times run parallel to the logic of the subject, 
but it must also be admitted that they run parallel to 
good pedagogy, and we care more for pedagogy than 
we do for a smooth-running piece of logical machin- 



The Pedagogy of Youth 185 

ery. The chief reason that geography has been a 
bore to students and a burden to teachers and a grief 
to pedagogues, is that we have been trying to organize 
it and present it logically, beginning with mathematical 
geography, in which the child cannot possibly have 
any interest, and going from this through physical to 
political. If the wits of the pedagogic and scientific 
world were summoned to devise a more unpromising 
and fruitless scheme for geography work than the one 
of following out the logic of the subject, their work 
would surely result in unequivocal failure. 

In the same way the history stories and the myth 
of the earlier stage bring the child naturally to the 
more careful and detailed study of history. The 
work at this period should be full of human interest. 
The time has not yet come for the more abstract study 
of treaties, constitutions, and government documents. 
In the study of American history the beginnings ap- 
peal strongly to children of this age. Well- written 
stories of the voyages of Columbus, of the expeditions 
of Drake and De Soto, of the work of La Salle and 
Marquette, of the landing of the Pilgrims, of the found- 
ing of Jamestown and St. Augustine, the winning of 
the West, the stories of David Crockett, Daniel Boone, 
and George Rogers Clark, have a great fascination 



1 86 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

for the child at this age and will be retained with re- 
markable tenacity. This is the " blood and thunder" 
age of the child. He will now follow in detail the 
maneuvers of an army, the rough plan of a campaign, 
the results of battles, with more delight and often with 
more accuracy than he will at a later stage. One 
reason why so much time is given by older students 
to wars instead of to interpretation and historical 
documents (on the ground that there is no time for the 
latter) is that the wars were not taught when they 
should have been taught. Any normal child who has 
had rational training will, at the age of ten, read about 
the battles of the American Revolution from Lexing- 
ton and Concord to Yorktown with approximately as 
much understanding as he will at twenty, and with 
infinitely more pleasure and enthusiasm. Only let 
the history be authentic and well written, and do not 
deal it out piecemeal, but let it be read, a whole cam- 
paign or a whole war at a time. No wonder a child 
loses interest and enthusiasm when the lesson closes 
in the middle of a retreat, and he is punished for read- 
ing beyond the prescribed limits of the assignment. 

Biography should constitute a large part of the 
history course at this time. The strong interest in 
human life and activity so characteristic of the earlier 



The Pedagogy of Youth 187 

stage has not waned. A majority of our children 
come from the public schools after three or four years 
spent in the study of some text-book in history with- 
out any very definite idea of the subject. If we would 
but take advantage of their normal interests and intro- 
duce them to the lives of the men and the women who 
have made history, the results obtained would be more 
in proportion to the time and energy spent. It would 
be unwise perhaps to advocate biography exclusively 
for this stage, but I have no doubt that if the average 
ten-year-old child could have access to the biographies 
of twenty of the most influential citizens of our coun- 
try, representatives of different times and movements, 
his real knowledge of history would be as far in excess 
of what it usually is as a mountain exceeds a mole 
hill. In the life of Washington alone he would be 
introduced to colonial government, the French and 
Indian War, attempts at union, the colonial and conti- 
nental congress, the various grievances of the colonies, 
the Declaration of Independence, government un- 
der the Articles of Confederation, the Revolutionary 
War, the adoption of the Constitution, the birth of the 
government, the division of the people into parties, 
and many other facts of history. The aim must be 
to present the work in a connected form. It will be 



1 88 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

time enough to cross-section it and bring together 
everything that happened everywhere in a given year, 
after the children have the longitudinal lines laid. 
We must have the historical warp before we try to put 
in the historical woof. 

Manual work adapted to the development of the 
child should constitute a regular part of the programme 
during this stage. Just what this work should be, 
external circumstances and the interest and ability of 
the child must determine, but in most cases drawing, 
carving, and similar exercises requiring not too fine 
an adjustment of the muscles are desirable. And 
this is above all things the time for practice and drill 
in these lines of muscular activity that are to become 
habitual. The child who is to become an expert 
pianist or violinist, for example, should devote these 
years to laborious drill upon these instruments. Work 
in voice culture should be begun at this time, although 
judicious care needs to be exercised later to prevent 
permanent injury when the voice is " changing." 
The child who is to have complete mastery of his body, 
of the physical movements, must not neglect the work 
in physical culture. At no time in one's life is it so 
true as at this period, that "as you live now will deter- 
mine how you will always live." 



The Pedagogy of Youth 189 

In the pedagogical discussions of this book dogmatism 
has been studiously avoided. It would argue a lack of 
comprehension of the entire subject to say that at a given 
time such and such parts of such and such subjects, and 
nothing else, should be studied. The attempt has been 
merely to show that many things the schools are trying 
to do at certain times are out of place, and to show 
what would be the better things to do. I have, there- 
fore, in displacing some of the standard studies 
(reading, arithmetic, etc.) before seven years of age, 
suggested some lines of work that are suitable for this 
time, without drawing a line between the things that 
must, and must not, be done. Indeed, it would be 
strange if there are not many things unnoticed in that 
discussion which should have a place in the curriculum. 
The purpose was simply to work out the principle 
and illustrate rather fully. And so, in the discussion 
of work for this stage from nine to twelve or thirteen, 
it cannot be said what are all the things that may be 
done and all that may not. But I have taken up the 
subjects that were discarded in the previous stage and 
have tried to show that they should now have a promi- 
nent place in the curriculum, and have made sugges- 
tions as to the nature of all the work for the entire 
period without any attempt to go into details. 



190 The Basis of Practical Teaching 

The observations and studies have led to this con- 
clusion in regard to the work for the two stages ending 
at seven or eight and twelve or thirteen respectively: 
that the work in the earlier stage as a rule is too 
heavy and that too much is expected of the child; 
and that the work of the later stage is too light and too 
little required of the child. 

I wish, in conclusion, to emphasize the fact that 
many of the fundamentals in training of all kinds 
can be gotten only through service, through long- con- 
tinued application; and that there is no time in the 
life of the individual so well suited — from the stand- 
points of mental capital and development, and phys- 
ical capital and development — to drill work as the 
years just preceding the dawn of adolescence. 



OCT 7 1905 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 720 679_a 



